Opening accounts

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This section of documentation discusses features principally used when DriveWealth’s Account Management product is enabled. Partners managing customers on their own won’t have these workflows available.

To open an investment account for your customer, it’s important to understand the utility of both the Users and the Accounts entities. At DriveWealth, customer verification and trading experience are split into two APIs:

1. Users: The Users API is used to collect and verify customers’ personal identification information. It is also used to document a customer's acknowledgement to agreements and Terms and conditions. PII collected will be used for documents generated by DriveWealth, such as account summary and tax statements.

Reminder: a customer's address must not be a P.O. Box. The customer's address must be a physical location.

Reminder: For most integrations the key/value pair findersFee will be marked as false. So, findersFee: false

Reminder: For some integrations the organization may already have a lot of the customer's PII and may not need to ask all the questions needed to collect this information again. In such cases, the information may be passed to our APIs directly. There are some conditions where you need to collect this information, please review this section on those details.

POST /back-office/users
{
	"userType": "INDIVIDUAL_TRADER",
	"documents": [
		{
			"type": "BASIC_INFO",
			"data": {
				"firstName": "Daryl",
				"lastName": "Hall",
				"username": "DHall",
				"country": "USA",
				"phone": "2914443333",
				"emailAddress": "[email protected]",
				"language": "en_US"
			}
		},
    ...
	]
}

2. Accounts: The Accounts API details the investment offering the customer receives (such as a self directed account, or a robo advisory account), as well as key capabilities of the account such as leverage. The Account will later provide key details such as financial performance metrics and the market value of the assets held within the Account.

POST /back-office/accounts
{
     "userID": "640eab18-1316-49ba-aded-33e9a7ab2a79",
     "accountType": "LIVE",
     "accountManagementType": "SELF",
     "tradingType": "CASH"
}

To fully create an Account for a given customer, both APIs are required. A single User may own multiple accounts, if you wish to allow the customer to participate in multiple types of investment offerings.

In general, open an Account by calling the above two APIs in sequence. Depending on how you are validating customer details, this may immediately result in an opened Account, or you may need to use additional APIs to prove the details are accurate. Refer to Customer verification to learn more.

Minimum required information

To use the Account Management product, DriveWealth is required to collect a minimum amount of personal identifiable information in order to onboard and verify a customer.

DriveWealth sections a User's personal information into objects you’ll find in the API Reference called documents. Refer there for which fields are generally required for most use cases. DriveWealth’s Integrations team can provide more clarity if there are fields that can be disabled for your use case.

The digital documents you'll likely need can be found in this table:

Uploading physical document proofs

Based on the customer’s country of residence, DriveWealth may require additional physical document proofs (e.g. a driver’s license).

These countries do not require a physical document:

• United States
• United Kingdom
• Australia

For all other countries of residences, upload documents via the Create Physical Document.

POST /back-office/documents
{
	"userID": "a799741d-03fb-40c9-b341-7d2eb17cf62a",
	"type": "DRIVER_LICENSE",
	"document": "data:/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQA...;base64",
	"side": "FRONT"
}

Best practices

1. Know what IDs in your country are supported by DriveWealth's KYC vendors.
   • Note how many sides are required to be uploaded per ID
2. Ask the Integrations team which of the supported IDs result in the highest approval rate.
   • For example, in India, the ID with the highest approval rate is the Tax ID (PAN Card). In Ireland, it’s the Irish Passport.
   • International Driver Licenses have the lowest approval rate because our KYC vendor only accepts specific Driving Licenses in various countries. For example, in India, Onfido only supports three driving licenses: Delhi, Karnataka, and Maharashtra.
3. Ensure the customer’s name on the ID matches exactly with the name on the account application.
4. Ensure the customer is uploading a good quality image of the ID that takes up the entire frame for it to be clearly readable and identifiable. IDs uploaded that have poor photo quality (blurry or have a glare, a flash, or shade obscuring the image) and/or small photos of IDs are primary reasons why accounts are not approved.
5. Make sure customers upload the correct side of the ID. If only the front side of the ID is required, and the customer uploads the back, the new account will not be approved.

Authorizing an advisor

If your firm is registered as an Investment Advisor, the Advisor’s details must be connected to brokerage accounts opened for your customers. To do so, DriveWealth will issue you the following static details:

• riaUserID: A unique ID representing a User entity on DriveWealth. This User is the advisor firm itself, not an end customer

These details must be supplied with every customer onboarded:

POST /back-office/accounts
{
  "userID": "cc07f91b-7ee1-...",
  "accountType": "LIVE",
  "accountManagementType": "RIA_MANAGED",
  "tradingType": "CASH",
  "riaUserID": "{your riaUserID}"
}

Notice in the above, the accountManagementType is also set to RIA_MANAGED. This informs DriveWealth that the Orders placed in this Account are actually directed by your Advisor firm, not directly by the customer themselves.

Adding other parties

Beneficiaries

Some account holders wish to designate beneficiaries on their account, who will receive assets if the account holder passes away. These can be supplied via the Create Beneficiaries API.

Trusted contacts

Trusted contacts are additional people a brokerage firm can contact in case there’s a concern about a specific Account. This is often collected if an account holder is elderly. Today, these can be listed on an Account only by DriveWealth manually.

Mandatory Customer Questions

See, here for more details.