What is Cashflows Payments?

Cashflows delivers a range of services designed to help businesses manage their payments. These services are delivered through a single, omnichannel platform accessed via a set of powerful APIs. The Payments API is part of that suite, providing cardholder not present (e-commerce, mobile and mail order telephone order) credit and debit card acquisition, with support for both card authentication via 3D-Secure, and card authorisation through the major worldwide schemes. 

If you wish to accept cardholder present transactions through physical terminals, you will need to make use of the Acquiring API instead, but please contact our customer services team to discuss your options. 

How does the Cashflows Payments API work? 

A consumer selects a product or a service to purchase from your mobile or online store. 

The consumer’s payment card details are entered via an online payment page, Virtual Terminal, or card wallet. 

These details, along with information about the transaction (such as Amount and Currency) are forwarded by your website or gateway to our Payments API service. 

We send the payment card details via the card scheme networks to the consumer’s card issuing bank for authorisation. 

The card issuer checks the card details, that the cardholder's account has enough funds and that the card hasn't been reported lost or stolen. If everything is OK, the issuing bank authorise the amount requested and debit those funds from the consumer’s payment card account. 

The authorisation results are returned to you via the Payment API response, and subsequently your customer, the cardholder, confirming the result of the transaction 

We receive the funds from the card scheme networks and then remit them into your remittance account. From there, you can transfer those funds to your business bank accounts, normally using automated processes set up when your merchant account is created. 

Cashflows Payments API 

The Payments API provides straightforward programmatic access to functions that request card authentications, authorisations, fund captures, refunds and other operations that can be performed on a payment card. 

It provides these functions through a synchronous, secure, POST-Response mechanism using a single Merchant Number to indicate which of your merchant account you wish to use for transaction processing. 

Requests can be supplied in XML or JSON format, and responses received in either, dependent upon the Accept Header you request. All calls are stateless, HTTPS POSTs to specific command URIs. 

The mechanism used to sign Payments API requests (SHA2-512), is consistent with other Cashflows APIs, allowing re-use of integration code across multiple Cashflows endpoints.