Salt edge: Troubleshooting Salt Edge bank feeds

Open Banking is a way for consumers to access their financial services regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK and its equivalents in the EU.

Salt Edge is an FCA-registered aggregator that securely provides PocketSmith with account and transaction data for financial institutions based in the UK/EU, with your consent. It's an elegant and transparent solution that adheres to PSD2 ( Payment Services Directive 2) open banking regulations.

Salt Edge uses your bank's own open banking API to connect us directly to the bank. As such, the error you're encountering may come from the bank themselves.

If the error you've run into displays the bank's own online banking interface, as in the example below, this indicates the error is with the bank itself, and we will not be able to resolve this.

We recommend contacting your bank directly as the best option for getting this problem resolved.

Often, these errors are temporary and resolved on the next sync attempt. As a first step, please wait 5-10 minutes, then trigger another sync: Trigger a sync for a bank feed connection

If the error persists  after 48 hours, please get in touch with PocketSmith Support and let us know which feed is experiencing this issue.

We will then open an investigation with Salt Edge; to let them know there is a feed issue that will need to be resolved from their side of things.

For security purposes, Salt Edge Limited is only provided access to your accounts for a limited period of time - usually up to 90 days. Due to this, you will need to renew your authorisation after this period has lapsed.

Once 90-days have lapsed, you'll see the "Authorisation unsuccessful" error occur in PocketSmith. To renew this connection and resolve this error, please re-enter your credentials, ensuring they match those you use to sign in to your banking website.

Sometimes, these errors can occur because something has gone wrong with your internet browser session and its connection to Salt Edge. This can happen when attempting to authorise separate connections for the same financial institution in quick succession, and we believe it relates to caching in your internet browser causing a hiccup at Salt Edge.

To check if the issue you're seeing is browser-specific, please try the following:

After following the above, we expect that the connection should sync successfully on the next authorisation attempt. To authorise your connection, please head over to Manage Feeds (Manage > Feeds) and click the "Try again" button. This will open a popup, and then take you through the Salt Edge authorisation process. Your connections should sync, and transactions will start flowing into your linked accounts again.

This error alerts the user that there are no linked accounts for a connection.

To automatically fetch transactions from the bank feed connection, feed accounts (accounts that the connection has found) need to be linked within your PocketSmith.

PocketSmith doesn't link accounts on your behalf. This step is user-led, and works in accordance with your preferences, depending on whether you'd like to link any existing transaction accounts (containing historical transactions) or create brand-new linked accounts.

For an illustrated, step-by-step guide to linking your accounts within PocketSmith, please check out our Learn Centre documentation: Steps to link a feed to an account

Perhaps you've opened a new account with an existing connection, or you want to bring a previously unauthorised account into PocketSmith - but you find that the account is not already listed within your Unlinked Accounts section. If you find that this is the case, you'll need to do this via the Salt Edge dashboard.

Please note that your bank may restrict which accounts are available to connect to via open banking.

For example, under PSD2 legislation, banks are not obligated to offer open banking connections for some types of Savings accounts (where there are penalties at the bank for withdrawals that would deem those accounts exempt from the "payment account" classification).

If you find that some accounts are not available for connection, you can reach out to your bank directly to enquire as to whether there are plans to extend the accounts that are available to connect.