Why are my customers receiving an 'Insufficient Funds' error message?

Understandably it's concerning whenever customers receive an error message when attempting to make a payment through our platform. There are a few reasons customers might see an 'insufficient funds' error.

One reason is that we use the lower of two balances in a customer's bank account when processing payments. These are the Current balance and the Available balance.

The Current balance is the officially available balance before any pending transactions have cleared, while the Available balance is the amount of money that is actually available to spend. This is usually smaller than the Current balance.

If either of these two balances is lower than the requested payment amount, the payment will fail, resulting in an 'Insufficient Funds' error from the merchant.

Common Scenarios

1. The customer has recently funded their account - thus the funds did not fully clear into the account when they attempted to make a payment.

2. The customer is making use of overdraft or credit facilities on the account.

Solution

To avoid this issue, we recommend querying both the Current and Available balances of the user's account and using the lowest of the two as the true account balance to allow for intervention before the error appears.

If you continue to experience issues with your users and payments, please don't hesitate to contact our support team for further assistance 🧑🏿‍💻