Pre-fill loan applications with verified liability data, pull real-time account details, and assess risk with credit health attributes.
Once you’ve completed the Getting Started flow — creating an Entity, verifying James Rodriguez’s identity, and discovering his 6 liability accounts — the next step is to use that data for application pre-fill, real-time underwriting, and enforced debt paydown.
Before pulling real-time data or planning payment disbursements, check each account’s products array. This tells you what’s available for each account based on Method’s coverage of that merchant.From the Getting Started guide, James’s 6 accounts have different product availability:
Account
Products
Implication
Chase Freedom Flex
balance, update, payment
Full coverage — real-time data and payments
Discover it
balance, update, payment
Full coverage
Toyota Motor Credit
balance, update, payment
Full coverage
FedLoan
balance, update
Data only — no payment routing via Method
Upstart
balance, update, payment
Full coverage
Rocket Mortgage
balance, update
Data only — no payment routing via Method
For application pre-fill and qualification, you primarily need update (to pull real-time balances, rates, and payment amounts for DTI calculations). All six of James’s accounts support update, so you can build a complete financial picture.For enforced debt paydown (covered later on this page), you need payment. Four of the six accounts support it. If your underwriting requires paying off a specific account, verify payment is available before making that a loan condition.
The Entity creation and SMS verification steps from the Getting Started guide already capture the applicant’s name, phone, email, date of birth, and address. This data, combined with the liabilities discovered through Connect, means James doesn’t need to manually list his debts on your application form.Instead of asking “List all outstanding debts with balances and monthly payments,” your application can present James with his verified liability picture and ask him to confirm it. This eliminates manual entry errors, reduces application abandonment, and gives your underwriting team data they can trust.
Connect gives you account identifiers and basic liability metadata (creditor name, account type, mask). To get current balances, interest rates, payment due dates, and credit limits, request an Update for each account.Request an update for the Chase Freedom Flex credit card:
All monetary values are in cents. The Chase card balance of 320000 is $3,200.00, and the auto loan balance of 1845000 is $18,450.00. The credit limit of 800000 is $8,000.00.
With real-time data from Updates, you can pre-populate your application with verified figures:
Account
Balance
Rate
Monthly Payment
Type
Chase Freedom Flex
$3,200
24.99% APR
$89 min
Credit Card
Toyota Motor Credit
$18,450
5.49% fixed
$385
Auto Loan
Repeat this process for the remaining accounts to build the complete picture for DTI calculations.
Attributes provide structured credit health metrics without requiring you to parse raw credit report data. For lending qualification, request the attributes most relevant to credit risk:
These attributes feed directly into your underwriting logic:
Credit card usage at 38% (fair): James is using $5,000 of roughly $13,000 in total credit limits. This is above the ideal 30% threshold but not alarming.
Payment history at 97% (good): Strong on-time payment record. The 3% gap may reflect a single late payment in the past.
No active delinquencies (false): James is current on all obligations.
Additional attributes for deeper risk assessment
Beyond the three shown above, you can request credit_health_derogatory_marks, credit_health_hard_inquiries, credit_health_total_accounts, credit_health_credit_age, and credit_health_open_accounts. For a full list, see the Attributes API Reference.
Many lenders require applicants to pay down or pay off specific debts as a condition of loan approval. This is common in consolidation loans, HELOCs, and cash-out refinances where the lender wants to ensure existing high-interest debt is eliminated.With Method, you can enforce this programmatically: once the loan is funded, initiate payments directly from your corporate funding account to the applicant’s existing creditors — before any funds reach the borrower.
Not all discovered liabilities support payments through Method. Before initiating an enforced paydown, confirm that the target account has payment in its products array — this indicates Method has payment coverage for that merchant. Accounts without payment coverage will need to be handled outside of Method’s payment rails.From the Connect results, James has four accounts eligible for paydown through Method (those with payment in their products). For this example, your underwriting team requires James to pay off his Upstart personal loan ($12,000) as a condition of your consolidation loan. Since the Upstart account includes payment in its products, Method can route the funds directly.
The $12,000 payment flows directly from your corporate funding account (acc_hmap9mbgfLcf9) to Upstart (acc_YXDrjADGjC76U). The borrower never touches these funds, which eliminates the risk of misuse and guarantees the debt is retired.
Only initiate enforced paydowns to accounts with payment in their products array. Attempting to create a payment to an account without payment coverage will return an error. Always verify product availability programmatically before committing to paydown conditions in your loan terms.
Payment descriptions are limited to 10 characters. Use short, descriptive labels like "EDP Payoff", "Paydown", or "Consolidat".
