Payment risk and credit notifications

A number of factors can determine the likelihood that a payment will settle in your merchant account and how long it will take to settle. This uncertainty can make it difficult to know when to consider a payment complete and provide services.

You can configure the payment_creditable webhook to inform you immediately when you should credit a payment.

A common example of this is that payments made over the SEPA Credit Transfer payment scheme take 1-3 days to settle. Waiting until the payment has settled before providing your customer with services is a far worse user experience.

The payment_creditable webhook can assess whether the risk of a payment settling is high or low. If the risk is low and within your risk appetite, you can make the payment sooner and improve your customers' experience.

Different webhook behaviours

Currently, there are two behaviours for the payment_creditable webhook:

• Settled: Payments are considered creditable once they have a status of settled.
• Risk assessed: Payments are considered creditable based on TrueLayer's payment risk assessment.
  Low-risk payments are creditable once they have a status of executed.
  High-risk payments are creditable once they have a status of settled.

Enable and configure the payment_creditable webhook

When you contact us to enable this feature, you need to provide:

• A choice of either the settled or risk assessed behaviour for each payment scheme.
  These are: the Faster Payments Scheme, SEPA Instant Credit Transfer and SEPA Credit Transfer.
• Which countries you want to assess risk in if you select the risk assessed behaviour for a scheme.
• A maximum value of low-risk payments outstanding that aren't settled, if you select the risk assessed behaviour for a scheme.
  This is a rolling monthly value, to limit your potential loss to a set threshold.

Risk assessment criteria

If you select risk assessed as the behaviour of the payment_creditable webhook, whether a payment is considered high- or low-risk is based on several factors. TrueLayer's risk assessment criteria include user behaviours, outstanding payments, and banking providers.

Example of credit notifications

An online gaming company has integrated the Payments API v3 with their app. Their customers make payments in the app to top up their balance, which they then use to play games or access other services. They have a large customer base in Europe, which largely pay using SEPA Credit Transfer to avoid any fees when they top up their account.

Over time, the company gets feedback from a number of customers, which are frustrated that it can take 3 working days to access their funds. In order to improve this experience, the company enables the payment_creditable webhook.

They now receive a webhook that enables them to fund the customer account immediately if the:

• The customer has a history of valid payments.
• The customer doesn't have too many other pending payments.
• The payment is from a reliable banking provider.

This is an example of the information returned in the webhook:

{
  "type": "payment_creditable",
  "event_version": 1,
  "event_id": "b8d4dda0-ff2c-4d77-a6da-4615e4bad941",
  "payment_id": "60c0a60ed8d7-4e5b-ac79-401b1d8a8633",
  "creditable_at": "2023-06-13T15:00:00.000Z"
}