Why We Started Building eCheck.io
Most businesses assume a bank account is valid once a customer enters routing and account numbers.
The reality is very different.
Failed ACH transactions, invalid accounts, closed accounts, fraud attempts, and payment returns quietly cost businesses thousands of dollars every year. The worst part is that many companies don't discover these issues until after money has already started moving.
While researching payment operations and risk management, we kept seeing the same pattern:
Businesses were investing heavily in customer acquisition and onboarding, but relying on limited account validation before initiating ACH payments.
That gap creates unnecessary risk.
So we started building eCheck.io.
Our goal is simple:
Help businesses verify bank accounts instantly and make smarter payment decisions before a transaction is initiated.
Instead of finding problems after a payment fails, businesses can gain real-time account intelligence during onboarding, payment setup, or risk review.
We're currently focused on helping:
• Fintech platforms
• SaaS companies
• Marketplaces
• Lenders
• Businesses processing ACH payments at scale
What has surprised us most during customer discovery is how many teams still depend on manual reviews, micro-deposits, or delayed verification processes that slow growth and create friction for legitimate customers.
We're early in the journey and actively speaking with operators, founders, and finance teams.
A few questions for the community:
How does your company currently verify bank accounts?
What's the most expensive payment failure you've experienced?
If you process ACH payments, what is your biggest operational challenge today?
I'd love to hear how others are approaching this problem and what solutions have worked (or failed) for you.
Building in public starts with listening.
Your post names the real enemy twice, and the second one is sharper than the first. Everyone in this space says "know before you pay." But your line about micro-deposits and manual reviews that "slow growth and create friction for legitimate customers" is the wedge nobody leads with. Fraud is the fear, but the two-day micro-deposit wait is the tax you pay on every good customer. Own that one: you are not only risk protection, you are the end of making your best customers wait to prove they are real.
That matters because you actually have two pitches for two buyers, and they convert on opposite emotions. The risk team, lenders and fraud, buys "stop the expensive return you find out about three days later." The growth team, fintech and SaaS onboarding, buys "stop losing good signups to a verification flow that takes two days." Same product, opposite feeling: one is fear, the other is conversion. Pick which one leads the homepage, because a page that whispers both persuades neither.
If I had to compress the whole thing: card-like certainty at ACH cost, decided before the money moves. That is the sentence a CFO repeats. And to your question about the most expensive failure, the pattern you will hear is usually not the one big fraud loss, it is the quiet aggregate, the returns plus the good customers abandoned at micro-deposit, added up over a year. Which of those two costs your customers more is the answer that tells you which buyer to build the page for.
What caught my attention was the customer discovery point.
Seeing manual reviews and delayed verification processes definitely suggests friction exists.
The part I'd be most curious about is whether those workflows persist because verification is the problem, or because they're solving a different concern that happens to look like a verification problem from the outside.
Those can end up leading to very different products.