Banking as a Service (BaaS) represents a new business model where a bank or other financial institution extends its financial operations and infrastructure to serve non-financial client organizations (such as retailers and utility companies). Regardless of your type of business, BaaS enables you to embed financial products into your services without having to launch and operate your own financial institution.

BaaS provides several benefits to non-financial organizations, including:

• A quick, simple route to regulatory compliance

• Access to established back-office operations for financial services, including Know-your-customer (KYC) and fraud/money-laundering prevention

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If you are interested in eventually becoming a financial institution, this transition will be easier since the underlying core banking and payments technology is part of the Pismo platform.

The BaaS features you can access (via APIs and streaming events) include:

• Digital account management: create, close, and update information

• P2P transactions

• Generic cash-in and cash-out, which can be used to orchestrate and settle transactions (for example, voucher purchases) with external providers

• Pix (Brazilian Instant Payments Network)

  • Cash-in and cash-out

  • Key management (DICT)

• Bill and tax payments (available soon in the Brazilian market)

• Open Finance: data sharing and payment initiation (available soon in the Brazilian market)

Pismo Partner: Pay2All

Currently, Pismo offers BaaS through Pay2all, which is a payment institution created by the Brazilian bank BTG Pactual. As a regulated payment institution, Pay2all is responsible for:

• Approving or rejecting transactions

• Managing credit and fund limits

• Implementing KYC, fraud/money laundering prevention processes

• Reporting (such as generating individual income reports) and other regulatory requirements

Account management

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Important

Clients that use BaaS are required to use Pismo's services and events only as described in this guide. For example, when you create an account under BaaS, you may activate the account only after the KYC process and other confirmations are completed by the BaaS provider.

For more information, see Accounts overview.

Create account

This process consists of the client's request to create an account, originating from the client app. After KYC validation, customers receive an event with confirmation of account creation. If KYC disapproves the account, customers receive the event [onboarding prospect] (https://json-schemas.data.pismolabs.io/docs/onboarding/prospect-1.html) with the attribute prospectCancel = true.

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Important

The submit parameter must remain set to false when you first create an account. Then, after the KYC process and other confirmations are completed by the BaaS provider, you activate the account by setting the parameter to true. For more information, see Add an account.

Edit account information

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In the BaaS context, only changes to the customer's e-mail address and phone number are permitted.

Blocking and closing accounts

To close an account managed by BaaS, the client needs to change the account status to blocked (for more information, see Account status). Once this is done, Pismo contacts the BaaS provider to perform some validations. After these are completed, the account is officially closed (or it could be unblocked in some cases — like if there is a balance remaining in the account).

Balance and Activity Timeline

For more information, see Get daily account balance limits and Timeline events overview.

Cash transfers

Generic cash-out

This process consists of debiting the payer's account from a transfer made to the recipient's external account (an account that is not on the Pismo platform).

In the generic cash-out process, Pismo first performs validations to ensure that the payer's account is active and contains sufficient funds to cover the transfer. Pismo then submits the transaction to the BaaS provider, which executes the associated external transfer. After the transaction is approved or denied by the BaaS provider, a Financial transaction status change event is sent to the client. Possible statuses are:

• PROCESSING: Waiting to confirm transaction

• SETTLED: Transaction completed

• CANCELED: Transaction not executed (the debit from the payer's account is reversed)

Generic Cash in

This process consists of crediting in the recipient's account with funds transferred from a payer's external (non-Pismo) account.

The cash-in process begins with notification to Pismo from the BaaS provider to credit the recipient's account. When this is complete, Pismo notifies the recipient that the credit has been made to their bank account bypass sending a cash-in authorization event.

Pix transactions and key management

These are handled, respectively, by the Pix API and Pix management API.

Financial reconciliation

Functionality includes validating every transaction (in or out) that was processed at Pismo also exists in the client's settlement account, which is in the custody of the BaaS provider. (For Pay2all customers, this account is created by the BaaS provider.) In this scenario, the provider must report all inflows and outflows of money that occur in its clients' accounts. It does this through an integrated payments financial reconciliation event on the platform.