How a payment moves through NEO Collect.
From the payer's bank to a confirmed balance in your system, every stage is a ledger entry, a decision or a signed event. Nothing happens off the record.
One pooled account per currency. One ledger entry per customer.
Client funds sit in pooled, segregated safeguarding accounts held with our regulated banking partner, one per currency. NEO maintains a sub-ledger that records exactly which part of each pooled balance belongs to which of your customers. A virtual IBAN is the address of a sub-ledger account: it is a valid, routable IBAN, and any transfer sent to it lands in the pooled account and is attributed to that sub-account by the ledger.
Virtual accounts carry the holder's legal name, a currency, an external reference you choose, labels for reporting, and a rule set. They are created synchronously in the API response and can be frozen or closed at any time.
A transfer arrives on its rail.
The payer sends a normal bank transfer: SEPA Credit Transfer or SEPA Instant for EUR, Faster Payments for GBP, or BLINC between members of the network. The payer does not need a reference. Because every virtual IBAN maps to exactly one sub-account, the IBAN itself tells the ledger where the money belongs.
The moment the credit is visible on the pooled account, NEO creates a credit resource in a pending state and emits credit.received. The funds are not yet available to anyone.
Shield decides before money reaches a balance.
Every pending credit passes through the same pipeline: attribute by IBAN, compare the payer name with the account holder, screen the payer against sanctions, PEP and adverse-media lists, then apply the rules on the virtual account and on your programme. The result is one of three decisions.
- Accept. The credit settles to the sub-account and credit.settled fires.
- Review. The credit is held and appears in your review queue and ours. credit.in_review fires.
- Return. The credit is sent back to the payer's account with a reason, and credit.returned fires. The money never touches a balance.
Available, held, or in review.
Each virtual account has an available balance and, where Marketplace is enabled, held amounts tied to orders. Balances are updated by ledger entries only; there is no path that changes a balance without an entry. You can read balances at any time with GET /balances, and every entry is visible in the account's transaction history and daily statement.
Signed events your system can trust.
Every state change emits an event. Deliveries are signed with HMAC-SHA256 over a timestamp and the body, retried with exponential backoff for up to three days, and can be redelivered on request. Events may arrive out of order after retries, so your handler should read the resource's current state rather than assume sequence.
Money leaves only to verified beneficiaries.
Payouts go to beneficiaries that have passed a name check and, for seller payouts, belong to a KYB-verified wallet holder. Sweep rules move balances between your own accounts on a schedule or a threshold. BLINC transfers settle instantly with other members of the network in EUR, GBP, USD, JPY or CHF, 24 hours a day. Stablecoin conversions go only to whitelisted, screened wallets and are available to eligible clients after enhanced due diligence.
When a bank asks for money back.
A recall request from the payer's bank opens a case. Our recall team contacts the end user where needed, collects evidence from you through the API or console, and responds to the bank within its stated timeline. Every step is logged on the case and visible to you. Credits that Shield returned before settlement never become recalls, which is why first-party-only is on by default.
Everything reconciles because everything is an entry.
Daily CAMT.053, CSV and JSON statements per virtual account match the ledger entry for entry. Institutional clients also receive a monthly partner reporting pack covering volumes, return rate, recall ratio and corridor breakdown, signed off by our MLRO, ready to forward to your own bank or auditor.
Issue your first virtual IBAN this week.
Sandbox access is immediate. Live accounts follow KYB review of your business.