Update Associated Account Flow

Overview

The purpose of the update associated account flow is to notify Google of changes to an associated account.

Payment Integrators are highly encouraged to provide timely updates of account status changes to Google via the updateAssociatedAccount method. This improves the user experience by enabling Google to render the payment instrument as usable or not before a user attempts to make a payment. If updates are delayed, Google may render the instrument as usable, and allow users may make a payment attempt that results in a decline.

How the flow works

This method supports two types of account updates:

1. Associated account information updates. This allows the Payment Integrator to notify Google of changes to account information including account status, transaction limits, and account IDs. Transitions between the account status cases on this update type are supported.
2. Account closure updates. This allows the Payment Integrator to notify Google that the backing financial account has been closed. This state is not recoverable. The user's instrument will be cancelled and the user will be required to go through the association flow to use this Form of Payment again.

The Payment Integrator must provide the GPT identifying the account linking in requests to this method.

The Payment Integrator must also provide an updateSequenceTimestamp on account updates. This is used by Google to discard updates if a more recent update has already been applied to the user's instrument. This makes sure that the user's instrument reflects the current state of the account, and not the state of the last account update notification received by Google.

The account update request will be rejected if the updateSequenceTimestamp is not within +/- 1 minute of the Google server time when the request is received.