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Bare trust savings with Reliance

This collection covers:

  1. Onboarding a customer using Reliance
  2. Opening a bare trust savings account and adding members
  3. Tracking accrued interest
  4. Making, receiving, and tracking payments
  5. Closing a bank account

Before you start​

Before opening savings accounts for your customers, you must meet these regulatory requirements:

Regulatory requirements

  1. Savings summary box — Provide customers with a savings summary box before they open an account. This must be included in your account opening flow before the customer signs a contractual agreement, and listed on your website's savings product page. See our product and marketing standards for the template.

  2. FSCS acknowledgement — Customers must acknowledge they have read the FSCS information sheet and exclusions list before entering into a contract. Eligible deposits are protected up to £120,000 per depositor. Store these acknowledgements with your other commercial documents.

1. Onboard a customer using Reliance​

You are using Reliance onboarding. This is where your company carries out due diligence on your customers using your own tools, and then provides us with the information we require and attestation that you have verified that information.

Before you can open bare trust accounts, you will need to create legal persons to represent your customers in our system.

The Reliance onboarding guides explain how to upload your customer information, to obtain the legal person references required to open bare trust accounts for your customers.

2. Open a bare trust savings account and add members​

Once you’ve onboarded your customers, you can open a bare trust savings account. This is a pooled account that holds funds from multiple customers.

🐷 Open a savings account

You will need to add your customers as members of the pooled account, using the legal person URLs you created in the last step. The account cannot receive payments until you have added at least one member.

🏊 Manage pooled account members

After that, you must confirm that pooled account membership is up-to-date once every 24 hours.

3. Tracking accrued interest​

Interest accrues daily on each savings account based on its end-of-day balance (17:00 UK time) and is paid out (capitalised) at the end of each month. For full details on how interest is calculated, including rounding rules, see Interest.

Querying accrued interest via the API​

You can retrieve the current accrued interest for any account by polling the account endpoint:

GET /v0/bank/accounts/{bank-account-id}

The response includes an accrued-interest field:

{
  "accrued-interest": {
    "currency": "GBP",
    "value": "12.34"
  },
  "available-balance": {
    "currency": "GBP",
    "value": "5000.00"
  },
  "account-balance": {
    "currency": "GBP",
    "value": "5000.00"
  }
}

The accrued-interest value reflects the interest accumulated since the last capitalisation date.

Reconciling monthly interest payments​

At the start of each month, accrued interest is capitalised — you'll see a transaction crediting the account. Use a transaction-created webhook to be notified when this happens, and reconcile it against the accrued-interest value from your last poll.

4. Payments​

Receive a payment into the account​

Griffin automatically receives payments, so there are no actions you need to take here, but you can track the progress of inbound payments by creating a webhook.

Make a payment from the account​

You can use a webhook or polling to track payments you have submitted.

💸 Make a payment

5. Close the bank account​

Once closed, the bank account cannot be reopened. Once a bank account enters the closing state, it will no longer accept inbound payments.

🙅 Close a bank account