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The Generic Connector for Formance Connectivity provides a way to connect your Formance Stack with Financial Service Providers that are not natively supported by Formance. Formance Connectivity interacts with the remote Financial Service Provider through the Generic Connector as follows: The Generic Connector is in charge of polling the data from the Financial Service Provider and then sending it to Formance Connectivity. It polls the following data:
  • The list of accounts available in the Financial Service Provider and their associated balances and transactions
  • The list of beneficiaries available in the Financial Service Provider for payouts

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Integration with the Financial Service Provider

The Generic Connector interacts with the Financial Service Provider by sending requests formatted according to the Generic Connector API specifications and expecting responses formatted according to the same specifications. As a consequence, it is necessary to create a service on your side that will interact with the Financial Service Provider and expose the data with the expected format. The typical deployment of the Generic Connector is as follows:

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Polling mechanism

The Generic Connector uses a state-based approach for polling payment data efficiently.

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How it works

  1. The connector stores the timestamp of the last successful data retrieval
  2. In subsequent polls, it uses this timestamp to fetch only new or updated data
  3. The UpdatedAtFrom query parameter is passed in API calls to your service
  4. This parameter indicates that only transactions from that specific point in time should be returned

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Data storage and updates

The system doesn’t fetch all data fresh every time it polls. Instead:
  • Each batch of data received is stored
  • The internal state is updated with the latest timestamp of the data received
  • In the next polling cycle, the updated timestamp is used to fetch only new or changed data

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Benefits

This polling method offers several advantages:
  • Reduced data transfer: Only fetches new or updated information
  • Minimized load: Reduces strain on both Formance and your API
  • No duplicates: Ensures the database stays up-to-date without duplicating existing data
When setting up the Generic Connector, ensure that your API can handle and respond correctly to the UpdatedAtFrom query parameter. This allows the system to efficiently retrieve only the necessary data during each polling cycle.

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Authentication

When instantiating the Generic Connector, you will need to pass an API key that will be used to authenticate the requests to your service. The Generic Connector will send requests with the API key in the Authorization header so that your service can authenticate the requests. Example: 
Authorization: Bearer <API_KEY>