Merchant accounts for payments

Merchant accounts are real bank accounts managed for you by TrueLayer. They are required in order to make payouts or refunds with the Payments API.

Retrieve the details of your merchant accounts, transactions to and from your merchant accounts, and a list of merchant account payment sources using API requests.

If you just need to check your merchant account details, balances, or a list of recent transactions, you can use the Merchant account dashboard in Console.

To make payouts from a merchant account, your merchant account must contain enough money to make the payment. You can add funds yourself, or users can make payments to your merchant account.

Merchant account benefits

Different currencies

You can have multiple merchant accounts so that you can use separate accounts for different businesses. For example, you can have separate merchant accounts and authorisation for GBP and EUR transactions. This means you could use the hosted payment page or embedded payment page for EUR payments, and a direct API integration for GBP payments.

Note that you can only have one merchant account per currency for each client_id.

Simple, flexible pay-ins

You can use your merchant account ID to direct payments to your merchant account. This reduces the chance of errors or mistakes and streamlines the pay-in flow.

Each merchant account also has an associated account number, sort code and IBAN, which you can also receive payments to.

Payouts

Each payment to a merchant account generates a payment_source_id, an ID that identifies each payment. You can use this to make a payout to an account that previously made a payment to your merchant account with no need for further user authorisation. This is known as a closed-loop payout.

You can make a payout to an account that has not previously paid into your merchant account too. This is known as an open-loop payout

Refunds

Similarly to a closed-loop payout, a refund is a payment made back to a user without the need for user authorisation. Refunds are based on a previous payment id. This means that there's no need to provide payment or user details. Additionally, you can make a refund over multiple payments, but they cannot exceed the initial payment value.