Unit
Unit Technical Briefing
Published March 29, 2022
Supported by Modern Treasury , IowaEDA and Brale
Overview
Leah, a client engineer at Unit, walks through the Unit banking-as-a-service platform — the three-part challenge of building banking into a fintech (compliance, technology, bank relationships) and how Unit handles all three so product teams can focus on acquisition and differentiation. The demo covers Unit's two build environments (Sandbox for unbounded prototyping, Pilot for real production with minor limits), generating an API token, submitting a business application through the KYB flow, Unit's optional white-label application form, subscribing to webhooks for real-time events, and issuing a deposit account plus virtual debit card in two API calls. Leah then reveals the full card details using Unit's VGS-backed sensitive-details service and buys a webcam cover on Amazon, closing the loop with the settled-transaction webhook firing back into the dashboard.
0:00 Introduction to Unit — banking-as-a-service
Leah, a client engineer at Unit, introduces Unit — a banking-as-a-service platform founded on the idea that building banking into a fintech product shouldn't take 18 months and a seven-figure investment. Unit covers the three faceted challenge: compliance, technology, and banking relationships.
1:00 Unit's ecosystem: Lance and Abound
A preview of two Unit customers on the day's agenda — Lance, one of Unit's earliest clients building a banking experience for freelancers, and Abound, a Unit partner offering tax and benefits automation that several Unit clients embed to help freelancers manage taxes.
1:30 Sandbox vs Pilot environments
Unit offers two build surfaces: a Sandbox with test data for unbounded prototyping, and Pilot, a limited production environment with real accounts, cards, and live funds so teams can ship a functional MVP after just a few API calls.
2:30 Creating an API token in Pilot
Walk-through of the Pilot signup flow and generating a Unit API token — scoping, expiration, source-IP restrictions — ready to drop into Postman for the rest of the demo.
4:00 Create a business application and KYB
Submitting a business application via Unit's API kicks off the KYB flow — some applications auto-approve, others require document uploads or manual review. Unit also offers a white-label application form so fintechs don't need to build their own.
5:30 Webhooks for real-time events
Unit uses webhooks to push real-time events like application approved or documents awaiting, so client apps can chain actions (e.g. auto-create an account the moment a customer is created) without polling.
7:00 Create a deposit account and virtual debit card
Two API calls: one to create a deposit account linked to the customer, a second to issue a virtual business debit card that's active the moment it's created.
8:30 VGS for PCI-safe sensitive card details
Unit's sensitive-card-details service uses Very Good Security (VGS) so fintechs can reveal full PAN and CVV to a cardholder without ever touching PCI data themselves — the sample HTML ships in the docs.
9:30 Live Amazon purchase
End-to-end test: Leah swipes the freshly-issued Unit virtual debit card through Amazon checkout to buy a webcam cover, and the resulting authorization and settled transaction flow back through the webhook feed.
Presented by Leah Staniorski — Unit · LinkedIn · website
Topics: Banking-as-a-Service, Embedded Finance
