Payment Initiation & Direct Debit services
Open APIs continue to play an important role in transforming the corporate-to-bank business. Both banks and FinTechs continue to roll out new solutions that simplify API connectivity and add value-added services for corporate clients.
The Payment Initiation API supports corporates making this transformation by delivering a real-time interface for them to initiate a credit transfer payment or request a direct debit from their bank or other payment service provider.
This API is designed to capture rich data at the start of the journey, so that the instruction contains enough information to facilitate straight-through processing, to support financial crime compliance verification and enable reconciliation. As such it can transform the way payments works today. This can reduce both costs for users as well as the time taken from payment initiation to final delivery of the funds.
An overview of the API
Our community has developed the Payment Initiation API to create a global standard that corporates and banks can adopt to both consume and deliver an on demand, real-time payment initiation product. The API is intended for: corporate end-users; banks offering service to their corporate clients; and technology firms that want to embed support for the standardised API into their applications.
It supports the following main business processes:
- Single instance of a credit transfer initiation that fits within a customer-to-bank business process
- Domestic, cross-border and/or cross currency payment initiations
- Payment instructions that result in book transfers at the debtor agent or payments to another financial institution
- Payment instructions that result in an electronic cash transfer to the creditor account or in the emission of a cheque
- A single instance of a direct debit collection initiation.
Payment initiation request response flow:
Direct debit collection request response flow:
Benefits of the Payment Initiation service
The Payment Initiation API is used by a debtor to instruct their payment service provider to move funds from their account to a beneficiary account. This service delivers the following benefits:
- A global standard for payment initiation services
- A ubiquitous standard based on ISO 20022 and open API specification
- Enables instant, real-time, straight-through and secure payments
- It can be used in domestic, cross-border and/or cross currency payment initiation
- Provides a standardised API to expose payment initiation services for payment processing applications provided by the payment product vendor.
Benefits of the Direct Debit service
The Direct Debit service provides payers with a simple and convenient method to schedule the collection of recurring payments. This service delivers the following benefits:
- A global standard for direct debit initiation
- A ubiquitous standard based on ISO 20022 and open API specification
- A cost-effective way to accept payment using credit cards
- A building block to lead to innovative automated payment collection