Atomic
Atomic Technical Briefing
Published April 6, 2021
Supported by Shopify and IowaEDA
Overview
Lindsay Davis and Jeff Hoffer of Atomic demo Atomic's payroll-connectivity APIs — used by hundreds of thousands of consumers per month across challenger banks, neobanks, and online lenders to switch direct deposits, verify employment, and verify income. Atomic ships a standard SDK across iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, and Kotlin that partners typically integrate in ~4 hours. The demo walks through launching Transact inside a partner app (passing a unique GUID and the destination account/routing number), distinguishing Deposit (write) flows from Identify/Verify (read) flows, and handling the employer-vs-payroll-provider selection. Atomic's conversion engineering is a differentiator: reverse-engineered in-modal password resets push authentication conversion to ~70%, and two-factor authentication (present in ~28% of logins) is handled inside the flow. Linked accounts enable periodic VOE/VOI refreshes without re-prompting the user. Partial direct-deposit switches power investing apps that want to route a percentage or dollar amount of each paycheck to a new destination without the user changing their primary bank.
0:00 Introduction to Atomic — payroll APIs
Lindsay opens the Atomic briefing with a question for the audience — "who pays you?" — to illustrate that roughly 20% of the hundreds of thousands of consumers who move through Atomic each month can identify their payroll provider by name.
1:00 Why payroll connectivity matters
Mapping an end user to their payroll provider unlocks direct-deposit switching (full or partial), verification of employment, and verification of income — the data set behind most modern fintech onboarding and underwriting flows.
1:30 Atomic SDK — iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter
Jeff walks through Atomic's standard SDK, with documentation and Postman collections. Atomic supports Kotlin, Swift, React Native, and Flutter natively, and partners typically get the standard SDK up and running in about four hours of development time.
2:30 Deposit, Identify, and Verify product flows
The three Atomic flows — Deposit (full or partial direct-deposit switching), Identify (switch plus data), and Verify (income and employment). Used by challenger banks, neobanks, and online personal-lending and payday-lending apps.
3:30 Launching Transact from your app
Initiating an API call into the Atomic SDK launches Transact inside the partner app or web view. Atomic is explicit about whether a flow is writing (direct-deposit switch) or reading (VOE/VOI) from the payroll system.
4:00 Unique GUID and destination account/routing
For every user, the partner passes a unique GUID so Atomic can identify the transaction and route webhooks. For a direct-deposit switch, the partner also passes the new account and routing numbers Atomic will write into the payroll system.
4:30 Employer vs. payroll-provider selection
Users can pick either their employer or payroll provider. Coverage and conversion are harder in payroll than in banking because the employer-to-payroll mapping changes — Atomic maintains that map and rebuilds per-payroll-provider quirks like Gusto's Google OAuth.
6:00 Partial direct-deposit switching for investing apps
With partners like Home Depot, Atomic exposes the ability to switch only a portion of a paycheck — popular with investment and savings apps where a consumer wants a dollar amount or percentage routed to a new account, keeping the rest at the current bank.
6:30 Conversion tricks — password reset and 2FA
Atomic reverse-engineered in-modal username and password resets, lifting authentication conversion to roughly 70%. Two-factor authentication is supported in-flow and appears in about 28% of logins, with linked-account credentials stored for periodic VOE/VOI refreshes.
Presented by Lindsay Davis and Jeff Hendren — Atomic
Topics: Open Banking, Embedded Finance
