Wire Drawdown Requests
Wire Drawdown Requests, sometimes colloquially known as "reverse wires", are a specialized type of Fedwire message that effectively asks a bank to send you a wire transfer for a specific amount. Think of it as a formal request saying "please send me $X via wire transfer."
Contrary to what you might expect, this feature doesn't usually work for most typical bank accounts. If you send a drawdown request to a consumer bank account in the US, the receiving bank likely won't even surface it in their user interface or notify the account holder.
Instead, Wire Drawdown Requests are most useful when you have a pre-negotiated relationship with your counterparty where they'll periodically send you wires, and the drawdown request serves as a cue for them to do so. This is common in business-to-business scenarios where regular settlements occur such as payroll or automated clearing.
For example, when Increase settles with Visa every night, this happens by Visa sending Increase's bank account a drawdown request, to which we then send a Wire Transfer in response.
How Wire Drawdown Requests work with Increase
Sending a drawdown request
To send a Wire Drawdown Request, use the Create Wire Drawdown Request API. This will send a Fedwire message to the specified bank requesting they send you a wire transfer. Because of the nuances described above, we ask that you first reach out to support@increase.com to enable the API for you.
If the counterparty sends a wire in response to your request, we'll update the status
field from pending
to fulfilled
and populate the fulfillment_inbound_wire_transfer_id
field with the ID of the resulting inbound wire transfer. We'll also send a wire_drawdown_request.updated
webhook to notify you of the fulfillment.
Receiving a drawdown request
If someone sends you a Wire Drawdown Request, we'll create an Inbound Wire Drawdown Request object and send an inbound_wire_drawdown_request.created
webhook to notify you.
You can then review the request and decide whether to fulfill it by sending a wire transfer to the requesting party using the Create Wire Transfer API. Note that there's no automatic fulfillment - you'll need to explicitly initiate the wire transfer if you choose to honor the request.