Learn how to securely connect and manage bank accounts and cards as payment sources for your organisations using Crezco's API.
💳 What is a payment source?
A payment source is a way for an organisation to fund payments through Crezco - either a connected bank account (via Open Banking) or a debit/credit card. An organisation can connect multiple payment sources, of either type, and choose which one to pay from on each pay run.
🔗 What is a bank connection?
A bank connection links a specific bank account to an organisation via secure Open Banking. This enables your platform to request the authorisation of payments from that account and fetch account information. Organisations can add multiple connections - ideal for managing a range of accounts.
💳 What is a card connection?
A card connection links a debit or credit card to an organisation, which can then be used to fund pay runs instead of a bank account. This is useful for end users whose bank doesn't support Open Banking well, or who simply prefer to pay by card. See Pay by card for the full guide to connecting and paying with cards.
🖥️ Hosted connection flows
To make integrating with Crezco's API easier, we provide hosted connection flows which return a url for you to redirect the user to, and require a returnUrl query parameter to redirect them back to your system on completion:
- Connect - the general-purpose connect flow, letting the user choose whether to add a bank account or a card. Recommended when onboarding an organisation for the first time.
- Connect Bank Account - goes straight to the bank connection flow.
- Connect Card - goes straight to the card connection flow.
You can provide users with the option to repeatedly access these flows if they wish to add more payment sources in the future. We publish webhooks notifying your system of changes in connected payment sources.
Within these flows, users can:
- Select a bank to connect and authorise the connection with their bank, or
- Enter their card details to connect a card
Why use it?
- Speed of integration: instant set‑up without the need to build flows, open banking integrations, or card entry forms yourself
- Robust security & compliance: handled by Crezco, with full PSD2 compliance for bank connections and PCI DSS compliant card handling
- Scalable experience: supports multiple connections of either type, and asynchronous flows
📨 Fetching payment sources
Once a payment source has been connected, you're able to fetch its details by calling Get payment sources. This returns the details and IDs of every connected bank account and card, which can be used to display information back to the user in your own UI and to specify the source of funds when creating a pay run.
We recommend using this over Get Organisation Bank Accounts, which only returns bank accounts and which we plan to deprecate in favour of this unified endpoint.
🧪 Connecting test payment sources
We appreciate you might not want to connect a real bank account or card when building and testing your integration, which is why Crezco offers test bank accounts and test cards. See Connecting test payment sources for the full list of test bank accounts, test cards, and simulated payment scenarios.