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.

📘
Customer Secrets
A Customer has a unique identifier and a secret key, which are used for the storage and encryption of their data.
Depending on your security and storage requirements, it is now possible for Bud to host this secret for you (recommended). Customers registered on the Bud platform in this way are referred to as "hosted customers".

📘
Advantages of using Hosted Customers
Using hosted customers has many benefits:

Faster and cheaper integration with the Bud Platform

Bud can automate many customer data actions for you (such as refreshing connected account data)

Automatically get the latest and best versions of our machine learning models applied to your entire customer base

We only expect clients with the highest security requirements and the infrastructure to maintain these to store customer secrets and use non-Hosted Customers.

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).

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

Registering Customers

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": {
            "host_secret": true,
            "other_fields": "..."
        }
    }
}

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

{
  "customer_context": {
    "host_secret": false
  }
}

which will yield the following response:

{
    "operation_id": "platform_v3_customers_post",
    "data": {
        "customer_id": "1c3e875c-1195-4c03-a05a-3b6a115a4f0c",
        "customer_secret": "63ae14a67e5cf8c8f7bf5376479d13e9",
        "customer_context": {
          "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. Similarly, for API endpoints that return any Customer data, the customer_secret is also required in order to decrypt and return that data.

❗️
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.

Removing Customers

Removing (or de-registering) a Customer can be simply achieved through the use of the DELETE /v1/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.