Bank account charge

Hey👋. We recommend checking out the overview to understand the basics of direct charge first. This guide assumes you've read that.

Charging bank accounts

Direct account charge allows you to collect payments directly from your customers' bank accounts.

There are three "flavours" of direct bank account charge, depending on the bank account's currency/country:

  1. Direct debit (for Nigerian accounts): The customer authorizes the payment with their bank, and the money is debited from their account.
  2. UK (GBP) accounts: The customer logs in to their bank's Internet/mobile banking and makes a transfer to a generated bank account.
  3. ACH payment (for USD and ZAR accounts)

This guide covers NG accounts (direct debit). See the guides for UK payments and ACH payments.

Process

Supported banks

Direct bank account debit is currently only supported for the following banks:

  • Access Bank (044)
  • Guaranty Trust Bank (058)
  • First Bank (011)
  • Sterling Bank (232)
  • UBA (033)
  • Zenith Bank (057)

Charging a Nigerian bank account involves three main steps:

  1. Initiate the payment: You send the payment details to the charge endpoint.
  2. Authorize the charge: The customer authorizes the payment with their bank. The means of authorization will depend on the bank.
  3. Verify the payment: As a failsafe, you'll call our API to verify that the payment was successful before giving value (the verify transaction endpoint).

Direct debit is different from bank transfers. In direct debit, the customer enters their account details and authorizing info on your page; in bank transfers, you give them account details, and they make a transfer to you.

Initiating the payment

First, you'll need the customer's bank account details:

  • their account_number, and
  • their account_bank, the code for their bank (get a list of bank codes with the get banks endpoint.

Combine those with the rest of the payment details to create the payload. You'll need to specify amount, currency, email, fullname, and a unique tx_ref. You can also specify more details, such as the customer's phone_number and custom meta information. See the [reference documentation] for details.

The currency you specify must match the account's currency (NGN).

Send these payment details to the charge NG account endpoint. Here are some examples with our SDKs:

// Install with: npm i flutterwave-node-v3

const Flutterwave = require('flutterwave-node-v3');
const flw = new Flutterwave(process.env.FLW_PUBLIC_KEY, process.env.FLW_SECRET_KEY);
const payload = {
    account_bank: "044",
    account_number: "0690000037",
    amount: 7500,
    currency: 'NGN',
    email: 'twista@rove.press',
    tx_ref: this.generateTransactionReference(),
}
await flw.Charge.ng(payload);
// Install with: composer require flutterwavedev/flutterwave-v3

$flw = new \Flutterwave\Rave(getenv('FLW_SECRET_KEY'));
// Set `PUBLIC_KEY` as an environment variable
$accountChargeService = new \Flutterwave\Account();
$payload = [
    "type" => "debit_ng_account",
    "account_bank" => "044",
    "account_number" => "0690000037",
    "amount" => 7500,
    "currency" => 'NGN',
    "email" => 'twista@rove.press',
    "tx_ref" => $this->generateTransactionReference(),
];
$response = $accountChargeService->accountCharge($payload);
# Install with: gem install flutterwave_sdk

require 'flutterwave_sdk'

flw = Flutterwave.new(ENV["FLW_PUBLIC_KEY"], ENV["FLW_SECRET_KEY"], ENV["FLW_ENCRYPTION_KEY"])
account_payment = AccountPayment.new(flw)
payload = {
    account_bank: "044",
    account_number: "0690000037",
    amount: 7500,
    currency: 'NGN',
    email: 'twista@rove.press',
    tx_ref: generate_transaction_reference,
}
# Automatically uses the right endpoint based on the currency
response = account_payment.initiate_charge payload
curl --request POST \
   --url https://api.flutterwave.com/v3/charges?type=debit_ng_account \
   --header 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_SECRET_KEY' \
   --header 'content-type: application/json' \
   --data '{
     "account_bank": "044",
     "account_number": "0690000037",
     "amount": 7500,
     "currency": "NGN",
     "email": "twista@rove.press",
     "tx_ref": "BJUYU399fcd43"
}'

Handling the response

If all goes well, you'll get a success response that gives you the details of the created transaction, and information on how to authorize that.

// Typically used by FirstBank and GTB
{
  "status": "success",
  "message": "Charge initiated",
  "data": {
    "id": 862960580,
    "tx_ref": "12345test_0",
    "flw_ref": "MPOG80201678720780553218",
    "device_fingerprint": "N/A",
    "amount": 200,
    "charged_amount": 202.8,
    "app_fee": 2.8,
    "merchant_fee": 0,
    "processor_response": "Pending validation",
    "auth_model": "INTERNET_BANKING",
    "currency": "NGN",
    "ip": "54.154.184.168",
    "narration": "Flutterwave Developers",
+   "status": "pending",
    "auth_url": "https://api.ravepay.co/flwv3-pug/getpaid/api/short-url/SCN0eHPMN-",
    "payment_type": "account",
    "fraud_status": "ok",
    "created_at": "2023-03-13T15:19:40.000Z",
    "account_id": 35308,
    "customer": {
      "id": 407680026,
      "phone_number": "08092269174",
      "name": "Wisdom Joshua",
      "email": "wsdmjsh@gmail.com",
      "created_at": "2022-08-11T15:32:30.000Z"
    },
    "meta": {
      "authorization": {
        "mode": "redirect",
+       "redirect": "https://api.ravepay.co/flwv3-pug/getpaid/api/short-url/SCN0eHPMN-",
+       "validate_instructions": ""
      }
    }
  }
}

Some key details in the response:

  • status is "successful", meaning that the charge was initiated successfully
  • data.status is "pending", meaning that the customer needs to authorize the transaction with their bank
  • meta.authorization contains the important details to authorize the payment:
    • The mode is "redirect", this means the customer should be redirected to their bank for authorization. You'll have a redirect field, which is where you should redirect your customer to.

Authorizing the transaction

To authorize the payment, you need to redirect the customer to the URL in the redirect field:

if (transaction.meta.authorization.mode == "redirect") {
    return res.redirect(transaction.meta.authorization.redirect);
}
if ($transaction["meta"]["authorization"]["mode"] == "redirect") {
  return redirect($transaction["meta"]["authorization"]["redirect"]);
}
if transaction["meta"]["authorization"]["mode"] == "redirect"
  return redirect to: transaction["meta"]["authorization"]["redirect"]
end

Completing the payment

When the payment is completed by the customer, we'll send you a webhook notification. Here's what the payload looks like:

{
  "event": "charge.completed",
  "data": {
    "id": 1190962,
    "tx_ref": "MC-1585230ew9v5050e8",
    "flw_ref": "URF_1585311768729_7845335",
    "device_fingerprint": "N/A",
    "amount": 7500,
    "currency": "NGN",
    "charged_amount": 7500,
    "app_fee": 147.2,
    "merchant_fee": 0,
    "processor_response": "Approved by Financial Institution",
    "auth_model": "AUTH",
    "ip": "N/A",
    "narration": "MerchantName",
    "status": "successful",
    "payment_type": "account",
    "created_at": "2020-03-27T12:22:48.000Z",
    "account_id": 74843,
    "customer": {
      "id": 349094,
      "email": "twista@rove.press",
    },
    "account": {
      "account_number": "0690000040",
      "bank_code": "044",
      "account_name": "Yemi Desola"
    }
  }
}

In your webhook handler, you can then verify the payment and credit your customer with whatever they paid for. See our guide to transaction verification for details.

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