API Entities

Apto’s APIs are built around three main objects:

Cardholder

A user's entity within the Apto platform. All Know Your Customer (KYC) information is stored here, and KYC is performed against the cardholder. Depending on your program configuration, the cardholder can either be your company or your users.

Card

The card itself, which is an externally-facing payment instrument, either virtual or physical, for interacting with funds on the associated balance. All Apto cards are tied to a balance account. In consumer programs, creating a cardholder automatically issues a card and accompanying balance. In commercial programs, additional cards can be created to draw upon corporate accounts.

Transaction

The payments made by a cardholder with their card as well as other transaction events such as refunds. In general, for a transaction to be authorized, the associated card must have sufficient balance to cover the transaction amount. Though in enterprise programs, you can be involved in the authorization process via our Transaction Auth API in order to automatically approve or deny authorization when a user attempts to pay with their card. Learn more about the transaction authorization process.

An additional concept is the balance account, which represents the balance / store of funds associated with and accessed by a given card.

Green Program is a funds good debit program in which there is a 1:1:1 mapping between a cardholder, their balance account, and their card. That is, creating a cardholder automatically creates a single balance account for them and a single card that can then draw upon this balance. And, cardholders can only ever have one card.

In Blue or Orange Programs, Apto is able to support multiple cards and balances per cardholder. With our Corporations API, we can also support scenarios where multiple cards draw upon the same corporate balance.

For more detailed information, checkout our Mobile API documentation and Core API documentation.