Recurring payments

With Variable Recurring Payments, you can accept payments on a recurring basis by setting up a mandate between you and your user.

Once you've set up an authorised mandate, you can accept payments for:

Fixed subscriptions: A recurring transaction made at regular intervals for a product or a service.
Variable subscriptions: Transactions that occur on a non-fixed schedule using the details in the mandate.
Ad hoc background payments

Payment journey

To set up a recurring payment, your user has to authorise a payment mandate. A mandate is an agreement of the authorisation that a customer has given you to take payments from their payment account.

At a high level, the steps required to progress a user to making a payment are as follows:

Define the mandate and consent parameters, and set up the mandate to be authorised.
Send your user through a mandate authorisation journey.
Make a payment within the consent parameters defined on the mandate.
Receive status updates on the payment attempt, and receive funds.

Testing in Sandbox

Clients are encouraged to start exploring and testing our API in the Sandbox environment. The behaviour of our Sandbox API is identical to the Live environment, except for the actual flow of funds. This means that you will not be able to see end to end references in action. Click here for more information about references.

In this environment you'll find the NatWest Sandbox provider (ob-natwest-vrp-sandbox). To authorise a mandate on the NatWest authentication page, you can use customer number 123456789012 and the pin / password 5 7 2 / 4 3 6.

If you would like to test providing the optional Remitter object, please bear in mind it has to be one of the two accounts that are selectable during the authorisation flow for the provided NatWest Sandbox account. This means the Sort Code and Account Numbers should be either 500000 and 12345601 OR 500000 and 12345602. That account will then be shown on the NatWest page after authorisation. Failure to supply valid account identifiers (ie: sort code and account number) will result in mandate creation failure.

NEXT STEPS

Create a payment mandate