Nuapay provides the option to interact with Open Banking as an individual Merchant or as a Partner entity (with the ability to call services on behalf of specific merchants linked to that entity).
Merchant |
A single entity | Calls Nuapay Open Banking APIs for itself |
Partner |
A “parent” entity with one or more “child” merchants linked to it | Calls Nuapay Open Banking APIs on behalf of individual merchants (using an OAuth token to reference the required merchant entity). See Token Management for more details on this. |
Merchant Integration
Two authentication approaches are available for merchant integrators, to ensure the security of your sensitive data, with both methods using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) over the HTTPS protocol:
- API Keys
- OAuth Tokens
API Key Authentication
Access to the API is controlled by HTTP Basic authentication.
When generating an API request, provide your API key as the basic authentication username, encoded in Base64 in all your API requests. A password is not required, however the request must be made from an allowed IP address.
API authentication header format: | Authorization: Basic Base64(<API_Key>:) |
API Key Example
To generate an encoded, Base64 HTTP Header (“Authorization: Basic {Base64(API_KEY:)}”) for use in your requests:
- With the following given
APIKey = bb09c2b6a9478720765c757a8bcadf1aa1fb31554566a21118c9c75e26c29686
- Encode this in base 64:
bb09c2b6a9478720765c757a8bcadf1aa1fb31554566a21118c9c75e26c29686:
(note that the colon (:) is required) - the HTTPS header will then be:
"Authorization: Basic YmIwOWMyYjZhOTQ3ODcyMDc2NWM3NTdhOGJjYWRmMWFhMWZiMzE1NTQ1NjZhMjExMThjOWM3NWUyNmMyOTY4Njo="
Token Authentication
It is also possible to use OAuth tokens to secure your requests, rather than your API Key.
OAuth Tokens offer greater flexibility to manage access to specific resources as they can be protected by Scopes:
- This is useful, for example, where you may want to give an engineer access to work with the
Create Payment
service but due to security concerns, you may not want that user to have access to the Refund service. - Similarly, you may have outsourced some development expertise and you want to grant access to a service for only a period of time until the outsourced work is complete. An OAuth token can be configured with a Time-to-Live of 2 weeks for example, after which point it cannot be used.
- If you were to provide your API key to the outsourced resource in this scenario, then effectively that 3rd-party developer could still interact with Open Banking services via your API Key (even after completing their contracted work for you).
Available Scopes
The following scopes are currently available:
openbanking_pisp | Payment Initiation Service Provider access, restircted to retrieving ASPSP details and Payment initiation actions |
openbanking_aisp | Account Information Service Provider access, restricted to AISP functionality |
admin | All AISP and PISP functionality is available, at merchant level |
bankadmin | All AISP and PISP functionality is available, at partner level |
Partner Integration
When interacting with the Open Banking services as a partner, you will need to generate and use a specific token per merchant in your API requests.
The following steps are required to generate an access token for a specific merchant:
- You will be provided with a (Partner-grade) API Key when onboarded.
- Use this API Key to call the
GET /organisations
service; this returns a list of all organisations/merchants configured under your partner entity in Nuapay. - Select the required merchant’s encoded identifier from the response.
- Pass that encoded merchant identifier to the
Security /token
endpoint to retrieve an OAuth token unique to the selected merchant.
Use the OAuth token returned in the response in all subsequent API requests generated by you, as partner, on behalf of your merchant.
For more on this see Partner Integration.