A very common use case to find a customer’s account is to match the customer’s Tax ID with the Tax ID belonging to one of the account’s related person records. This use case is well supported and documented within the WealthTech API. However, there also exists a more uncommon use case to get the clear text value for a Tax ID token that’s returned from the WealthTech API. Let’s explore why would one need that.

The Use Case: Securities Lending Applications

There is a valid use case among clients in the securities lending space wherein they are trying to populate a new lending application with as much personal information (PII) from a target brokerage account. For underwriting purposes, they require access to as much PII as available for any related person that has signatory powers. This especially includes the SSN/Tax ID value. While the securities lending firm may have access to the account holder’s (the advisor’s client) SSN/Tax ID for the purpose of locating the target account, they will not have access to all the related persons SSN/Tax ID.

The WealthTech API Related Persons endpoint currently returns the tax id as a token (tax_id_token) which is not helpful for this requirement / use case. For the purpose of this use case, the tax id token’s clear text equivalent is needed to pre-populate the lending application.

The Solution

The WealthTech API offers a special API endpoint that can accept a list of one or more tax id tokens and returns a list of clear text tax ids.

Example Workflow

1. Retrieve the related persons objects for a given account ID and grab the Tax ID token for the related person(s) you’re interested in:

curl --request POST 'https://api.bridgeft.com/v2/account-management/related-persons/filter' \
     --header 'Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_TOKEN}' \
     --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
     --data-raw '
    {
    "account_id": 23412
	}'

Response:

{
    "current_page": 1,
    "data": [
        {
            "account_id": 23412,
            "addresses": [...],
            "date_of_birth": null,
            "email": "",
            "entity_name": "O'MALLEY LIVING TRUST",
            "first_name": "",
            "id": 32449,
            "last_name": "",
            "middle_initial": "",
            "object": "account_management.related_person",
            "phone_numbers": [],
            "tax_id_token": "RvHcixZe5XDSEtA5L7UpL8",
            "type": "Trust Name",
        },
        ...
    ]
}

2. Next, using the tax_id_token: RvHcixZe5XDSEtA5L7UpL8, retrieve the clear text tax id value using the special WealthTech API endpoint:

curl  --request POST 'https://api.bridgeft.com/v2/account-management/tax-id/exchange' \
	  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
	  --header 'Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_TOKEN} \
 	  --data '{
    "tax_id_tokens": 
    [
        "RvHcixZe5XDSEtA5L7UpL8"
    ]
}'

Response:

[
    {
        "tax_id_token": "RvHcixZe5XDSEtA5L7UpL8",
        "original_value": "000000000",
        "type": "ssn"
    }
]

⚠️

Security Note

BridgeFT takes account PII seriously. As such this API is not automatically available to all clients. It requires special authorization and entitlement. Please contact your account manager for more information.