Variable 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

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Sweeping in Console

You can also set up regular payments from your merchant account to your business account from the merchant account dashboard in Console.

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:

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

Testing in Sandbox

We recommend that you explore and test our API in the sandbox environment. The behaviour of our sandbox APIs are identical to live, except that no money actually moves. This means that you will not be able to see end-to-end references in action. For more information, see our docs on references and reconciliation.

In sandbox 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, it must 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 number 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.