Wallet Onboarding

Connect every credit card without manual entry. Using a customer’s name and phone number, Method discovers the credit cards they own, verifies ownership, and returns the metadata needed to render a complete wallet.

Why Use It?

Faster onboarding: Connect every credit card in one simple and seamless flow.
Frictionless checkout: Let customers pay instantly with any of their credit cards, with no manual entry.
Rewards activation: Enable customers to connect all their credit cards and start earning rewards across every eligible purchase.
Payment resilience: Keep multiple credit cards on file to automatically recover failed payments and reduce churn.

How It Works

Create an Entity

Create an Entity to represent your customer. Include their full name and phone number, and provide additional identity information such as date of birth, email address, or SSN when available to improve match rates.

Verify the Customer's Identity

Verify the customer’s phone number using either Method OTP (Method sends and verifies the one-time passcode) or Bring Your Own OTP (you verify the phone number yourself and provide the verification result to Method). See the Identity Verification guide for all supported methods.

Discover the Customer's Credit Cards

Call Connect to discover the credit card accounts your customer holds via a soft-pull credit report, with no impact on their credit score.

Steps 1-3 are the same foundational flow used by every Commerce use case. See Getting Started for full request and response examples.

Enrich the Discovered Cards

For each account returned by Connect, call Card Brand to retrieve enriched card metadata, including the issuer, card network, card product, card artwork, and rewards program. Use this metadata to render your customer’s wallet with recognizable card visuals.Here’s a card brand request for Emily’s Chase Sapphire Preferred (acc_LxwEqNicr66yP):

curl https://production.methodfi.com/accounts/acc_LxwEqNicr66yP/card_brands \
  -X POST \
  -H "Method-Version: 2026-03-30" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_WyZEWVfTcH7GqmPzUPk65Vjc"

{
  "id": "cbrd_Accm7P6t6mYQP",
  "account_id": "acc_LxwEqNicr66yP",
  "brands": [
    {
      "id": "pdt_27_brd_1",
      "card_product_id": "pdt_27",
      "description": "Chase Sapphire Preferred",
      "name": "Chase Sapphire Preferred",
      "issuer": "Chase",
      "network": "visa",
      "network_tier": "signature",
      "type": "specific",
      "url": "https://static.methodfi.com/card_brands/7d2f8a1bc3e5f094a6d831e5c7b29f04.png"
    }
  ],
  "status": "completed",
  "source": "method",
  "error": null,
  "created_at": "2025-12-10T14:30:12.139Z",
  "updated_at": "2025-12-10T14:30:12.139Z"
}

The brands array contains the card product details. Use name for display, url for the card art image, issuer for the bank name, and network / network_tier for routing decisions.

Card Brand is an asynchronous operation. The response above shows a completed request; in practice, subscribe to the card_brand.completed webhook to know when brand data is ready.

Retrieve Available Payment Cards

For each account returned by Connect, create a Payment Instrument to retrieve the card credentials required for checkout.Request a network_token Payment Instrument to receive a network-provisioned token instead of the raw card number. No raw card credentials are exposed to your systems, so you don’t need PCI compliance, and network tokens typically yield better authorization rates.

curl https://production.methodfi.com/accounts/acc_GAzrD99cUqGEN/payment_instruments \
  -X POST \
  -H "Method-Version: 2026-03-30" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_WyZEWVfTcH7GqmPzUPk65Vjc" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "type": "network_token"
  }'

If your processor requires raw card data, request a card Payment Instrument instead to receive the full credentials: number, expiration date, CVV, and billing zip code. This approach exposes PAN data to your systems and requires PCI compliance.

curl https://production.methodfi.com/accounts/acc_GAzrD99cUqGEN/payment_instruments \
  -X POST \
  -H "Method-Version: 2026-03-30" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_WyZEWVfTcH7GqmPzUPk65Vjc" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "type": "card"
  }'

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "id": "pmt_inst_pd788hPVhLT37",
    "account_id": "acc_GAzrD99cUqGEN",
    "type": "card",
    "card": {
      "number": "4000120000001154",
      "exp_month": "09",
      "exp_year": "2028",
      "cvv": "878",
      "billing_zip_code": "90028"
    },
    "network_token": null,
    "inbound_achwire_payment": null,
    "chargeable": true,
    "status": "completed",
    "error": null,
    "created_at": "2025-12-10T14:35:22.039Z",
    "updated_at": "2025-12-10T14:35:22.039Z"
  },
  "message": null
}

Payment Instruments is a gated product that requires approval. Contact your Method representative to enable access.

Alternative path: If you don’t need complete control over the onboarding experience, Opal provides an embedded flow that handles identity verification and card discovery for you.

What’s Next

Preauth Signals

Evaluate payment readiness before authorizing a transaction.

Card Brand API Reference

Full API documentation for Card Brand.

Payment Instruments API Reference

Full API documentation for Payment Instruments.

Getting Started

Entities

Identity Verification

Connect

Accounts

Updates

Payments

Additional Products

Use Cases: Commerce

Use Cases: Lending

Use Cases: PFM

Why Use It?

How It Works

What’s Next

Preauth Signals

Card Brand API Reference

Payment Instruments API Reference

​Why Use It?

​How It Works

​What’s Next

Preauth Signals

Card Brand API Reference

Payment Instruments API Reference

Why Use It?

How It Works

What’s Next