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Note on beneficiary

For this release of the Global Payments API, a beneficiary must be created (see Create a new beneficiary) before making a payment. A future release will enable you to embed beneficiary details directly within the payment request should you not wish to manage them within Orbital.

Introduction

You can create an outbound payment to an external beneficiary. The beneficiary can be specified within the payment request, or given as an existing beneficiary ID. Orbital will route the payment via the appropriate scheme and send webhook notifications to keep you updated on the status.

Orbital aims to streamline outbound payments, ensuring a seamless experience for clients. You don’t need to worry about the complexities of payment scheme processing or blockchain technology. Instead, Orbital simplifies this by offering a standardised endpoint that abstracts away from scheme-specific dependencies.

Creating a Payment

Payment Processing

When a you submit a request to create a payment, Orbital will first synchronously validate the request. If the request is accepted, we will generate a 202 Accepted response, otherwise a 400 Bad Request response detailing why it failed. For successfully validating payments, processing is asynchronous and you must either handle our webhook notifications for status updates, or query the payment using the Get a transaction by ID endpoint.

For payments processed outside of scheme or banking provider processing windows, Orbital will queue the payment and initiate them automatically the next banking business day.

Sufficient funds must be available in your source Orbital account, otherwise initial validation will fail and the payment will not be created.

Payment Approvals

Orbital consider a payment submitted via the Global Payments API as already approved from your perspective. We assume that you already have an internal approval process, which means that payments created using this API will bypass the Orbital approval process. In the future, and depending on demand, Orbital may include API payments as requiring approvals.

Payment Status

When a payment is created, it will transition through various states until reaching a final state of completed. You must not reconcile payments until either a PaymentCompleted !!!!!!!!!!!URL!!!!!!!!!!! webhook notification is received, or the transaction has been queried via !!!!!!!!URL!!!!!!!!!!! and has a status of Completed. The table below describes each of these status, including whether in a pending or final state.