FundStamp

Verification methodology

What FundStamp checks, what it does not check, and what a recipient should and should not conclude from a FundStamp link.

The name on the page

FundStamp does not verify the account holder’s name. The name at the top of a verification page is typed by the account holder, and the page says so on its face, in its own row, and again in the statements at the foot of the document. No government-ID check is performed and none is implied.

What is verified is access, where an account was connected. For a connected account, a person must complete a credentialed sign-in at that institution — the institution’s own login, including whatever second factor it requires — and a recipient can read such a row as: whoever sent this link can sign in to an account holding this much money. For a balance read from a statement or screenshot the account holder uploaded, no sign-in was performed and the page says so on that row; what such a row establishes is described under “Balances read from a statement” below.

This is deliberately a weaker claim than identity verification, and deliberately a stronger one than the emailed PDF statement it replaces, which is trivially editable and verifies nothing at all. Identity verification is not a substitute for know-your-customer diligence at closing, and neither is this.

Financial accounts

Accounts are connected through Plaid using read-only access. Institution usernames and passwords are entered inside Plaid’s own interface and are never seen, handled or stored by FundStamp. The connection is closed as soon as the balances have been read, so FundStamp holds no standing access to any account.

What counts toward the figure

FundStamp publishes one figure, and it answers one question: how much of this person’s money could reach a closing table. Not how much they hold, and not what asset class it sits in. Money is sorted by when it becomes available, because that is the only distinction a recipient can act on.

The published figure is the first two added together. The third is printed separately, outside the total, so that nobody can mistake one for the other.

Retirement money, and why some of it counts

Retirement accounts used to be excluded here without qualification. That was simple and it was wrong. A large share of small-business purchases in the United States are funded from a former employer’s retirement plan, through a structure the retirement industry calls a ROBS — Rollover as Business Startup. The buyer incorporates a C-corporation, that corporation adopts a qualified retirement plan, the buyer’s existing plan or IRA is rolled into it, and the plan purchases stock in the corporation, which then holds the cash to buy the business. It is not exotic: it rests on a specific statutory exemption from the prohibited-transaction rules that applies to employer plans and not to IRAs, and providers have administered it for decades.

So the question FundStamp asks of a retirement account is narrow and answerable: can this account make an eligible rollover distribution into a qualified employer plan? The IRS publishes a rollover chart that settles most of it. A former employer’s 401(k), 403(b), governmental 457(b), SEP IRA, traditional IRA or Thrift Savings Plan can. A Roth IRA cannot — it may only ever be rolled into another Roth IRA, which is the opposite of what most people assume, and is not to be confused with a Roth 401(k), which is an employer plan and can be.

Only the vested portion of an employer plan is counted, because employer contributions that have not vested are money the account holder would forfeit on the way out. Where no vested amount has been supplied, the account is not counted at all rather than counted at its balance.

Where the account type does not settle it, we ask

An institution reports an account’s type and nothing more, and several types hide the fact that decides the answer. “IRA” does not distinguish a rollover IRA from an inherited one. “401(k)” does not say whether the employer is a former employer. “457(b)” covers both a governmental plan, which can be rolled, and a non-governmental one, which by law is unfunded and cannot. In each case the two possibilities are fully eligible and fully ineligible, and there is no defensible guess.

FundStamp therefore asks the account holder, in plain language, one question per account. Answering is optional. An unanswered question does not remove the money and does not count it: the account is not shown to the recipient at all, and the holder is told on their own screen exactly what is missing and what would settle it.

Where the law itself is unsettled — designated Roth money inside an employer plan is the clearest example, where providers split and no IRS guidance resolves it — FundStamp takes the conservative view and leaves the money out. The account holder is told, on their own screen, exactly which account was left out and why, so that a conservative reading is never mistaken for a malfunction.

Margin borrowing is deducted

Where a brokerage account carries a margin loan, the borrowed amount is subtracted from that account before it contributes anything. A portfolio of $1,000,000 held against $250,000 of margin is counted as $750,000, because the lender has a claim on those same securities and only the difference could reach a closing table.

Other borrowing is not deducted, and the distinction is deliberate. A margin loan is a lien against the very assets being counted. A mortgage or a card balance is a claim on the person rather than on this portfolio, and the figure published here is available funds, not net worth.

Balances must have been read together

Every connected balance behind a figure must have been read within twenty-four hours of every other. A verification is a photograph of a position at one moment; balances read on different days are a collage, in which the same dollar can appear twice — read at one institution before a transfer and at the other afterwards. FundStamp never retrieves transactions, so a transfer between an account holder’s own accounts is invisible to it by design, and refusing to add up balances that were not read together is the only defense available where FundStamp chooses when to read. Uploaded statements are dated by their issuers on different cycles and cannot be read together; each is admitted at its own statement date, none older than ninety days, and the page prints the span of dates behind the figure so a recipient can weigh the collage for what it is.

The following are excluded outright, even when FundStamp can see them:

Cryptocurrency and term deposits are counted. A certificate of deposit or a fixed-income security is treated as available now, on the presumption that it can be liquidated at minimal cost, and cryptocurrency is treated as a marketable security and converted to US dollars. Both were excluded before August 30, 2026.

Excluded money is never shown to a recipient. It is not the recipient’s business, and listing money that cannot be used would invite questions about it. The account holder sees every exclusion, with its reason, on their own screen.

What the recipient sees

The account holder chooses between two presentations when they create a link.

A verified total is presented as a balance sheet: one row per account, giving the accounttype, the institution holding it, the last four digits, and the amount counted — grouped by when that money becomes available and subtotalled. That is how a recipient can check that only usable money was counted, rather than taking the claim on trust. The same rows are downloadable as a spreadsheet, with every note attached.

Account numbers, account names and individual holdings are never shown. The last four digits are, because they are how a recipient refers to an account in an email back to the buyer, and because two accounts of one type at one institution are otherwise indistinguishable.

Note the arithmetic this permits: where an account holder discloses their verified total, the per-account amounts allow a recipient to see how much sits where. That is a consequence of choosing to disclose the total, and the choice is presented as such. A threshold-only link shows no breakdown at all.

What a FundStamp link does not establish

FundStamp verifies financial information from connected financial institutions and displays only the financial claim authorized by the account holder. FundStamp does not guarantee that assets remain available, reserve funds for a transaction, or guarantee that a buyer will complete an acquisition.

Specifically, a FundStamp link is not evidence that funds are committed or escrowed, that they will remain available after the verification timestamp, that the buyer has financing in place, that a government-issued identity document was inspected, that the name shown is the buyer’s legal name, or that the buyer will close. It is a point-in-time statement about verified funds and verified access to the accounts behind it, intended as preliminary qualification only.

Balances read from a statement

Not every institution can be reached through Plaid, and the ones that cannot are disproportionately the private banks, trust companies and custodians this market uses. So an account holder may instead upload a statement, and the figures on it are read by software and published the same way a connected balance is.

What that establishes is narrower, and the page says which figures came which way. A figure read from a statement rests on a verbatim excerpt from the file the account holder uploaded. FundStamp does not keep that file and does not assess whether it is genuine: what is established is the figure and the name printed on it.

Each figure read from a statement is shown beside the sentence it was quoted from, located in the document’s own text rather than accepted as a fair paraphrase. A figure that appears in no located sentence is not published at all, which is what makes an invented number mechanically impossible whichever software did the reading. The statement itself is not kept: it is read in the upload request and destroyed before the figures are processed.

An equity investor may upload one too. Somebody who has confirmed a commitment can evidence it either by connecting their own accounts or by supplying a statement, and both are read under the rules on this page. Their account numbers and the institutions holding their money are never shown on the buyer’s page.

A statement in a company’s or a trust’s name

Money held through an LLC or a family trust is ordinary, and a statement printed in that name is not treated as a problem — but it is not treated as the holder’s money either until they say how they connect to it. Nothing from such a statement counts until they answer, and what they wrote is shown to recipients word for word, labeled as something stated rather than checked.

Where a public record exists — a company is registered with a Secretary of State; a revocable family trust usually is not — a link to it is required rather than optional. FundStamp opens that link, reads the page, and shows a short summary of what it said next to what the holder wrote. The link stays live on the recipient’s page, so anybody reading it can check the same record.

That check never decides whether money counts. A record naming somebody as an officer does not establish that the person who uploaded the statement is that person, so the holder’s own answer is what releases the figure and the page says exactly that. The same rules apply to a statement supplied by an equity investor.

A figure read from a support letter

An account holder may upload a letter from a lender or an investor. FundStamp reads the financing figure from it and publishes that figure only where the sentence containing it is located, character for character, in the document’s own text — so a figure that appears in no sentence of the letter does not appear on the page. That sentence is shown beside the figure, and the letter itself can be downloaded by anyone holding the link.

This is the one document FundStamp keeps. Statements are destroyed in the upload request; a support letter is retained precisely because sharing it is the point of supplying it. It is deleted when the account holder deletes the claim or their account, and if the person who wrote it withdraws.

No confirmation from the issuer is required for a letter to count, and FundStamp does not contact them. A recipient weighing the document can open it and read it, which is the strongest form this evidence takes. FundStamp performs no forensic authenticity check on any uploaded document, letter or statement.

A figure read from a bank’s letter about its own customer

A bank or brokerage will write a letter confirming what it holds for a client — often phrased as a minimum, such as “the combined balance of these accounts exceeds $150,000”. Account holders ask for these deliberately, because a letter proves the money without disclosing the exact balance, which is the same privacy this product exists to provide. FundStamp reads such a letter under the same verbatim rule as any other document.

Where the letter states a minimum, the page says at least. A letter saying a balance exceeds a figure supports that figure and supports nothing above it, so the row, the downloadable spreadsheet and any total containing it are conservative by construction. The page never renders a stated minimum as though it were an exact balance.

Availability depends on the kind of account, and a letter does not always say. Money in a checking account and money in a Traditional IRA reach a closing table differently. Where the letter’s own words settle which it is — a bank does not describe a retirement account as a balance on deposit — the figure is presented on that basis, and the reason is shown to the recipient. Where the words do not settle it, the account holder is asked, their answer is taken at their word, and the recipient is told that the account type was stated by the account holder rather than read from the document. Until they answer, the money counts towards nothing.

Whose money it is still matters. A letter naming somebody other than the account holder is treated as a third party’s funds under the rules above, not as the holder’s own.

Timing

Every figure is a snapshot taken at the moment shown on the verification page. A link continues to display the snapshot it was created from. Account holders can revoke any link at any time, and every link carries an expiration date.

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