Setup your Customers

Here, we’ll introduce you to the concept of a Customer on the Bud platform.

The basics

When we refer to a Customer, we’re talking about the end-user of yours and Bud’s technology. Customer entities in Bud have unique identifiers and this is used to store the customer data on the Bud platform. Bud clients that do not require customer level data storage (i.e. only using Bud's payments product) do not need to create customers.

Some examples of the type of data that can be stored against a customer record include:

• account information (accounts, balances, and transactions) that a customer has ingested through one of Bud’s aggregation services, e.g. Connect;
• enrichment and insight information that has been applied to, or identified from, a Customer’s financial data.

A Customer record can be simply created and deleted via the Customer API and you can see how many Customers are registered against your account in the Customers tab within the Bud Console (log in | info).

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Sandbox

In the sandbox, you can create an unlimited number of Customers for free. However, the sandbox only permits the use of dummy data.

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Assess use cases beware

Assess requires customers to be created in a different way, so if you intend to build an Assess-powered product, you should not create customers as above and should instead follow the specific setup guide for the Assess API.

Registering Customers

Register Customers on the Bud platform via the POST platform/v3/customers endpoint (here).

A typical request to POST platform/v3/customers requires no body, and an example response will look like this:

Example response:

{
    "operation_id": "platform_v3_customers_post",
    "data": {
        "customer_id": "1c3e875c-1195-4c03-a05a-3b6a115a4f0c",
        "customer_context": {
            "type": "personal",
            "other_fields": "..."
        }
    }
}

Usually, you can rely on the default values of the customer context that are populated, but for example if you wish to set a different region for your customer you can do it with the following request body:

{
  "customer_context": {
    "region": "US"
  }
}

which will yield the following response:

{
    "operation_id": "platform_v3_customers_post",
    "data": {
        "customer_id": "1c3e875c-1195-4c03-a05a-3b6a115a4f0c",
        "customer_context": {
          "type": "business",
          "other_fields": "..."
        }
    }
}

The customer_id is used as a unique identifier for that Customer and is required in all API endpoints that relate to a given customer.

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Users of non-Hosted Customers

Please store the customer_id and customer_secret securely as Bud only provides the customer_secret once.

Batch Creation of Customers

In almost all use-cases, we expect you to create customers individually at the point of sign-up, using the POST platform/v3/customers endpoint.

However, there are certain use-cases that may require the creation of customers in a batch. For this reason, we also offer the POST platform/v3/customers/batch endpoint which allows for a more efficient customer creation process if needed. You may need this endpoint if you are migrating an existing customer data set into the Bud platform.

Billing of Customers

Most clients of Bud will be billed by the number of customers that they have on the Bud platform, therefore if you have customers whom you no longer require data for or who have not connected an account, it is imperative that you remove them from the Bud platform in order to avoid being billed for them.

We recommend running a script once a month to remove any inactive or obsolete customers.

Removing Customers

Removing (or de-registering) a Customer can be simply achieved through the use of the DELETE /customers/{customer_id} endpoint (here). As well as removing the Customer record, this will completely delete of all data related to that Customer.

If you have any questions, please contact us via the chatbot (bottom-right of screen 👉) or via a support request or check our FAQs.