Credit Transfer payments allow you to push payments to your beneficiaries' accounts via the SEPA CT (SCT) and SEPA Instant CT Schemes (EUR currency) or via Faster Payments or Bacs Direct Credit (for GBP currency)
Credit Transfers (CTs) are push payments: you as the payer push funds to your payee (or beneficiary); in contrast, Direct Debits are pull payments: you as the payee pull funds from your payers’ accounts, once a mandate (granting you permission to do so) is in place.

A few points to note in relation to CTs:

  • CTs allow you to transfer funds from your account to a beneficiary’s account.
  • You must have sufficient balance on your account to make the payment.
  • You (the merchant) are the payer and the person to whom you are transferring funds is the beneficiary.
  • For a SEPA CT generated today, the beneficiary’s account is generally credited on the following working day (however payments generated prior to 08:00 GMT (see note below) should be credited on the same day).
  • A Bacs Direct Credit generated today will typically be credited to your beneficiary in 2 business days’ time.
  • Express payments (Faster Payments for GBP; SEPA CT Instant for EUR) are typically credited within seconds.

Using the Credit Transfer APIs

There are two approachs to CT creation:

  1. Before you initiate a CT payment, you create one or more beneficiaries. When you generate a payment, the beneficiary is referenced; this is a 2-step process, requiring two API calls: see Create Beneficiary and Create Credit Transfer.
  2. You initiate a CT payment where the beneficiary is created and the payment is generated; this is a 1-step process, requiring a single API call: Create Credit Transfer & Beneficiary.

Payment Schemes Supported

We currently support the following CT payment schemes:

Currency Payment Scheme
EUR SEPA CT
GBP Faster Payments
GBP Bacs Direct Credit