Pending and Shadow Transactions

A pending transaction is a transaction that has been initiated but has not been cleared or posted by the institution. For many institutions, Finicity is now able to capture pending transactions when they are displayed or provided in the institution’s data.

Pending transactions are ephemeral. Each connection to an institution will capture pending transactions that are available at that time; if any of those transactions are not found in a subsequent connection, they will be deleted from the data. In other words, an account will show the set of pending transactions which were found in the most recent aggregation of the account. Older pending transactions may disappear, and new transactions may appear.

There is no guarantee of continuity for transactions that move from pending to posted at the institution. When an institution changes a transaction from pending to posted, the pending transaction may disappear in Finicity’s data, and a new transaction with status active may appear. In some circumstances (depending on the institution), the status of the original transaction in the Finicity data may just change from pending to active.

“Pending” transactions are identified in the transaction record, like this:

Some institutions continue to modify or delete transactions long after they are first posted to the institution’s data feed. This practice can cause Finicity transactions to appear as duplicates, or to continue to appear in the Finicity data after they have disappeared from the institution’s current website.

Finicity has added the ability to identify transactions that were found in an earlier aggregation of an account, but are not found in the institution’s current data source. These shadow transactions are identified in thetransaction record, like this: