Live balances before every critical decision
Check whether a user has sufficient funds before initiating a payment, disbursing a loan, or underwriting an insurance premium. BankLyra returns real-time cleared and available balances directly from the bank's ledger.
What real-time balance access enables
Pre-payment sufficiency check
Before initiating a bank transfer or direct debit, query the user's cleared balance. Reduce failed payment rates and NSF fees by confirming funds exist before instruction — not after a bounce.
Instant credit affordability
For short-term lending and BNPL, a live balance check provides a real-time snapshot of the borrower's liquidity position — complementing transactional credit assessment with moment-of-application data.
Both cleared and available
The API returns CLBD (closing ledger balance) and XPCD (expected balance including pending transactions) wherever the bank provides them — giving you a full picture of the account's cash position.
Low-latency queries
Balance queries go direct to the bank's PSD2 endpoint with no intermediate caching. P95 latency is under 1.8 seconds for UK and German banks; BankLyra's connection pool maintains persistent sessions to minimise auth overhead.
Balance-only consent scope
Request only the balance scope when you don't need full transaction history. Narrower consent scope improves authorisation rates — users are less hesitant to approve access to balances than to full transaction history.
Balance monitoring webhooks
Subscribe to balance.updated webhooks to be notified when a user's balance crosses a threshold you define. Useful for float management, overdraft monitoring, and automated repayment triggers.
Cleared and expected balances in one call
Query GET /v1/accounts/{id}/balances with an active AIS consent and get both balance types in a standardised structure — regardless of whether the underlying bank is UK Open Banking, Berlin Group, or STET.
{
"account_id": "acc_01HXNP3K7WQBFR2T",
"balances": [
{
"type": "CLBD",
"amount": 4820.55,
"currency": "GBP",
"as_of": "2025-11-14T07:59:01Z"
},
{
"type": "XPCD",
"amount": 3640.10,
"currency": "GBP",
"as_of": "2025-11-14T07:59:01Z"
}
]
}Integrate balance checks in under an hour
Free sandbox, full coverage, no card required. Documentation covers all balance types and edge cases.