Institutions

An institution is an entity that Belvo can access information from. It can be a:

• bank institution, such as Banamex retail banking or HSBC business banking.
• fiscal institution, such as the Servicio de Administración Tributaria (SAT) in Mexico.
• gig institution, such as Uber or Rappi.

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Belvo resources and institutions

Not all institutions support the same Belvo resources. For example, the Accounts resource (used with banking and gig institutions) won't be supported in fiscal institutions. To know which resources you can use for each institution, look at the resources array when you use one of the methods in the table below.

You can see a complete list of banking institutions by either consulting our Institutions page, or querying the following resources:

Links

Whenever a user connects to their institution using the Belvo API, we create a Link. A Link is a set of credentials, for example the username and password, that is associated with the user. You will always need to first register a Link before being able to access information specific to that end user.

You can perform the following operations with our Links resource:

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Use your own identifier 🤩

We really recommend you make use of the external_id parameter when creating links as this will allow you to have your own unique identifier for a link in your own database. Check out our Link creation best practices article for more information.

Recurrent links

With recurrent links, Belvo automatically refreshes information weekly and notifies you via webhook so you always have up-to-date data. Then, when you receive the webhook, you can use GET requests to the List or Detail endpoints to instantly access up-to-date information, without needing to connect to the institution.

When you create a recurrent link, Belvo automatically retrieves key information about the Link ID. Once we have the information, we'll send you a historical webhook event indicating that you can make a GET request for that information.

We recommend you don't make POST calls immediately after a link is created. Instead, wait for a historical update webhook which indicates that Belvo has scraped the data and then you can make a GET request to retrieve the information (the webhook is sent soon after a link is created). If you make a GET request before you receive a historical webhook, you will receive responses with empty data fields or duplicated information.

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Use of user credentials

When using recurrent links, you must ensure that you comply with the data privacy regulation of the country you operate in. Additionally, we recommend that you inform users that their credentials will be used daily in order to cyclically retrieve up-to-date data.

Refresh rates

By default, recurrent links are automatically refreshed once every seven days. However, you can change the update frequency of your recurrent links to every:

• 6 hours (four times per day)
• 12 hours (twice a day)
• 24 hours (once a day)
• 30 days (once a month)

To change your refresh rate, just email our sales team at [email protected], and they'll get right to it.

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Link refresh schedules

Recurrent links are scheduled to be refreshed within a time frame from the moment they are created.
For example, if a recurrent link is created at 12:00 with a refresh rate of six hours, the system will schedule the first refresh between 12:00 and 18:00. If the system does the first refresh at 16:00, all following refreshes will be based on this time (so the next refresh will be at 22:00, then at 04:00, and then again at 10:00).

Single links

Single links are used to perform ad hoc data access to accounts, owners, transactions, and so on. For example, you can use it when you want to do an underwriting process to assess risk before lending money.

For single links, you have to perform POST calls to an institution every time you want to access fresh data.

Link statuses

A link can have different statuses, which reflect if the link is operational or if an action is needed to restore the link.

Checking the status of a link

You can find the status of a link by making one of the following queries and checking the value of the status field in the JSON response:

List all current links

Use the List all links method to get all the links you currently have access to. You can perform filtering on the responses to return just the links that have a certain status. In the example below, we filter the response to just have invalid links.

curl -- request POST 'https://sandbox.belvo.co/api/links/?status=invalid'\
  -u [Secret Key ID]:[Secret Key PASSWORD]

curl -- request POST 'https://sandbox.belvo.co/api/links/'\
  -u [Secret Key ID]:[Secret Key PASSWORD]

If you want to know about applying filters in your queries, see our Filtering responses article.

Get details for a specific link

Use the Get a link's details method to get the details for a specific Link.

curl -- request GET 'https://sandbox.belvo.co/api/links/{id}' \
  -u [Secret Key ID]:[Secret Key PASSWORD]

...
{
    “id”: “c70a25d4-d8ad-9999-b59e-b8f57f0e7123",
    “institution”: “liverpool_mx_retail”,
    “access_mode”: “recurrent”,
    “last_accessed_at”: “2019-10-04T10:58:20.374432Z”,
    “status”: “valid”, // Status of the link. In this case it's valid - perfect!
    “created_by”: “b18626ab-74aa-45fd-a66d-babf1461f962"
}
...

Where:

• {id} is the ID of the link. For example: c70a25d4-d8ad-9999-b59e-b8f57f0e7123.

What next

Now that you're caught up on institutions and links, check out our articles on:

• Product documentation
  • Banking
  • Fiscal
  • Gig economy
  • Income Verification
• Multi-factor authentication
• Filtering responses