International Payments

Customers can pay international beneficiaries quickly and easily, just as they can for domestic beneficiaries.

Customers authorise the money to be paid from their bank account in GBP, just as they do for domestic payments, but instead of being paid directly to the beneficiary, international payments are paid to a funding wallet held in the customer's name. The funds are then exchanged for the target currency and automatically paid out to the international beneficiary.

To be able to pay international beneficiaries, an Organisation requires the InternationalPayments feature to be enabled. You can check the enabled features of an Organisation using Get Organisation.

Prerequisites

• The Organisation needs to have connected a bank account using Connect
  • This enables the DomesticPayments feature
• The Organisation needs to have completed KYC/KYB verification using Verification flow
  • Once checks are complete, this enables the InternationalPayments feature

Pay Runs

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Pay runs can contain a mix of domestic and international payments

All payments are sent from the customer's bank account in GBP currency, to the sending bank an international payment looks like any other domestic payment.

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Scheduled pay runs cannot contain international payments

Due to the volatility of foreign exchange markets, scheduling international payments is not supported. Pay runs containing international payments must be paid immediately upon authorisation.

Rates and Fees

There are two types of fees charged on international payments:

• Provider Fixed Fees - These are fixed fees that vary by the payment network used to send the money internationally
• Provider Variable Fees - These are proportional to the value of the payment and can vary by target currency

Each of these fees and the exchange rate used to exchange currencies are given together with the payable in every context a payable is seen - Get pay run, and in webhook events for Payable updates.

See Get pay run for a detailed explanation of the currencyConversion response object and Collecting Fees for more info about the fees response object.

Reversed Payables

Sometimes when an international payment fails to deliver, it must be reversed and sent back to the payer. Depending on how far through processing a payment was when it failed, it could incur bank charges or losses in converting back to the funding currency, and the funds returned may be less than the funds sent.

When the status of a Payable is Returned then the amount returned will be shown in the payable's details in Get pay run and Payable status changed webhook events.

Supported Payments

We are in the process of rolling out support for currencies, countries, and payment networks.

We currently support the following currencies:

GBP payments to countries other than GB (United Kingdom) are not supported.

GBP is the only supported funding currency for any payment, domestic or international.

Currency Info

Different currencies have different trading cut-off times after which currency conversion is typically performed at midnight the following day. This means that any funding that occurs after the cut-off time will delay the Payable reaching Processed state until the following day.

Different payment networks have varying delivery times, there might also be some limitations from banks for minimum amounts not readily available.

See below for guidance per currency, with specific rail information if applicable: