Sending a Pre-notification

The Pre-notification tests all the banking information of a payment destined for an American financial institution, without actually transferring funds. You can send a Pre-notification before making the first payment, once you have obtained authorization from your customer to process payments to their account.

How to Send a Pre-notification

To send a Pre-notification:

  1. Create an Automated Clearing House (ACH) or RBC Standard (STD) input record with a zero dollar amount or using RBC Express, enter a payment with a zero dollar amount. A zero dollar amount payment is referred to as a prenote transaction.
  2. Choose a transaction code based on your customer's account type.
  3. Send your prenote transactions to RBC Royal Bank for processing.

How Do I Know if the Pre-notification Worked?

Valid Pre-notification transactions will be reported on the Payment Register. Invalid Pre-notification transactions can appear in two places.

If they failed initial submission to the ACH Direct Payments or Deposits service, they will be reported on the Input Verification and Edit Report. This type of failure may occur because of various errors such as invalid transaction code or ABA routing number.

If the receiving U.S. financial institution rejects the Pre-notification they should, within one business day, issue a notice detailing the reason for rejection or the action required. These invalid Pre-notifications are reported on the Notification of Change/ Pre- Note Response Report -For USA-FI.

Financial institutions in the USA may not notify you of incorrect information. Therefore, the subsequent transaction may be returned or be accepted with the correct information reported to you on the Notification of Change/Pre-Note Response Report for USA-FI. Some financial institutions in the USA may decide to process the incorrect payment instead of returning it and provide the correct information afterwards.

When notification is provided you must update your database and input files with the changes specified in the corrected data filed as reported to you on the Notification of Change/Pre-Note Response Report for USA-FI. This must be done within 6 banking days of receipt of the notification or prior to initiating another entry to the Receiver’s account whichever is later.

You may wish to generate another Pre-notification containing the corrected information.