How to get ready for using Bank Transfer Minimums

Every bank transfer payment added to a batch has to be above a certain minimum amount for the batch to be processed successfully. These minimum amounts are called Payment Minimums.

There are two components to take into consideration when calculating the payment minimum for a recipient:

You should query the /v1/recipients/:recipientId API to get the value of both of these components.

Keeping the above in mind, the suggested flow for calculating the Payment Minimums should involve the following steps:

Step 1: Query the Recipient API

Step 2: Access the Route Minimum and Estimated Fee

Step 3: Calculate the Payment Minimum.

Let’s go over these steps quickly.

Send a GET request to the /v1/recipients/:recipientId API to retrieve details of a recipient who you want to send a payment to. You’ll receive a response which will contain the following two objects:

In the response you receive in step 1, look for values of “routeMinimum” and “estimatedFees” objects.

These two values will help you calculate the Payment Minimum.

Before we move to the next step, a quick overview of what these values are:

Route Minimum is the lowest amount you can send to a recipient. It depends on the bank's minimum amount allowed for the selected route, considering the merchant’s country and primary currency.

These are the fees associated with a payment. Depending on who is paying the fee (merchant or recipient), it needs to be taken into consideration so the sent amount meets the Payment Minimum amount.

You can calculate Payment Minimum by using the values obtained in the steps above. Then, depending on who is paying the fee:

Once you calculate the Payment Minimum according to the above steps, make sure that the payments you add to your batch are above that minimum amount.

Following is a diagram to help you understand the decision flow that we just discussed.

Any payment in a batch whose amount is less than the Payment Minimum amount, will be an erroneous payment. A batch is processed with an all-or-none approach, meaning if there's even one erroneous payment, nothing in the batch will be processed. So if you add any payment with an amount below the Payment Minimum, the processing of the whole batch will fail, returning an HTTP 400 response.