Overview

ACH Direct Debit is a payment method that runs on the ACH (Automated Clearing House) network in the United States. It allows customers to pay for transactions by debiting directly from their bank account, as opposed to processing through a card brand.

availability

ACH Direct Debit is available to eligible merchants who can implement a custom client-side integration using our JavaScript v3 SDK. It's currently not available in our Drop-in UI.

Using our JavaScript v3 client-side SDK along with any of our server-side SDKs, eligible merchants can accept payments from US bank accounts via the Automated Clearing House (ACH) network.

At a high level, accepting ACH payments consists of four concepts:

• Tokenizing
• Vaulting
• Verifying
• Transacting

Depending on how you wish to verify your customer's bank account, these concepts will overlap in different ways.

Tokenizing

Tokenizing is the process of exchanging raw payment information for a secure, one-time-use token called a payment method nonce. For our ACH integration, you can tokenize a bank account by collecting a customer's bank details, including account and routing numbers. However, this will not verify the bank account, and the resulting nonce will not be transactable. Before you can create a transaction, you will need to use the nonce to vault the bank account and successfully verify it.

Vaulting

Vaulting is the process of exchanging a one-time-use payment method nonce for a peristent payment method token. For our ACH integration, vaulting includes verification options:

Vaulting with verification

When vaulting a bank account, you can choose to specify a verification method. This creates a vaulted payment method and initiates a verification in a single step. If the verification fails, you can keep retrying verifications on the same payment method. A vaulted payment method will only be transactable once it has had a successful verification.

Vaulting without verification

You can also vault a bank account without specifying a verification method. This will vault the payment method as usual, but no verification will be attempted. As stated above, this payment method will not be transactable until it has a subsequent successful verification.

Verifying

Braintree’s ACH Direct Debit integration offers several methods for verifying that the customer owns the bank account they provide to you for payment:

• Network check – Braintree instantly verifies the bank account details using bank account and routing number by applying risk rules and logics to determine the verification outcome. Personal/business information verification can be requested additionally.
• Micro-transfers – issues two separate credits of less than a dollar each to the customer’s bank account and requires the customer to confirm the exact amounts once they’re visible in the account
• Independent check – allows you to use your own verification method that’s not listed above and manually mark payment methods as verified

You can use any combination of these methods in order to meet your business needs. For example, one recommended flow is to use network check as an initial verification method with micro-transfers as a backup option.

For more details on ACH in general, all the verification methods, and the pros and cons of each, see our support article on ACH.