Creating a payment session

1. Create a Developer Account

Sign up for an account and get access to the Banked console. From here you can setup your business, and start taking payments.

2. Get Test Keys

After activating your account you are able to access your API test keys. You can find them under Test Application configuration. You can use these to create payments in our sandbox environment where no money will be transferred to/from providers.

To use the examples below, replace YOUR_API_KEY with your own.

3. Generate a Payment Session

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By default you are only permitted to create payment sessions with payee details that match an account linked to the console. In test you will have a fake bank account created automatically when signing up to the console. Unless you connect additional sandbox accounts, you must use the following payee details:

account_number 12345678
sort_code 010203

The following cURL command creates a PaymentSession which contains a single item. Remember to Replace YOUR_API_KEY with your test key, and YOUR_API_SECRET with your test secret.

curl --location --request POST "https://api.banked.com/v2/payment_sessions" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --user "YOUR_API_KEY:YOUR_API_SECRET" \
  --data "{
    \"reference\": \"Illuminate\",
    \"success_url\": \"http://example.com/success?id=__PAYMENT_ID__\",
    \"error_url\": \"http://example.com/error\",
    \"line_items\": [
      {
        \"name\": \"Candles\",
        \"amount\": 100,
        \"currency\": \"GBP\",
        \"quantity\": 4
      }
    ],
    \"payee\": {
      \"name\": \"Gerald Wiley\",
      \"account_number\": \"12345678\",
      \"sort_code\": \"010203\"
      },
    \"email_receipt\": true
}"

Please note that reference is limited to 18 characters, and can only contain letters, numbers or spaces. Some banks are limited in the characters they accept, in which case Banked will strip or replace certain characters in the reference field to meet the bank's requirements.

After running this in your terminal, you'll see the response will return a PaymentSession object with the URL required to access the web checkout and complete the payment.

{
    "amount": 400,
    "created_at": "2019-11-01 15:48:26 UTC",
    "currency": "GBP",
    "end_to_end_id": "728d061b-8e47-4052-be4f-5f9bcdee39ff",
    "error_url": "http://example.com/error",
    "id": "1ae1ce03-dfa9-4593-b487-65c656991cb5",
    "line_items": [
        {
            "amount": 100,
            "currency": "GBP",
            "description": null,
            "name": "Candles",
            "quantity": 4
        }
    ],
    "live": true,
    "payee": {
        "account_number": "12345678",
        "name": "Gerald Wiley",
        "sort_code": "010203"
    },
    "reference": "Illuminate",
    "state": "awaiting_payer",
    "success_url": "http://example.com/success?id=1ae1ce03-dfa9-4593-b487-65c656991cb5",
    "url": "https://checkout.banked.com/1ae1ce03-dfa9-4593-b487-65c656991cb5",
    "email_receipt": true
}

You can also include the optional payer field when creating a payment session, this will mean your customer will skip the first screen of Banked's checkout and go straight to the bank selection screen.

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Filling in payer details

If you know the user's name and email, add them in the payer field when creating the payment session. This allows for a much smoother payment experience and improves checkout conversion!

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Redirect URLs

Use the placeholder __PAYMENT_ID__ anywhere within success_url and error_url if you need to use the newly-created payment ID when the user is redirected.

4. Checkout with the Mock Bank

Using the provided URL to access the web checkout. You can see details of the PaymentSession and progress through the full checkout flow as a real customer would.

The key difference is we provide a 'mock' bank for developers to test with, which doesn't require the need for a real UK bank account. It also offers the ability to test pending and failed PaymentSessions without any money moving between providers.

5. View Payment Status

The console provides a list of PaymentSessions that have been created. You can toggle between live / test mode, to view PaymentSessions generated with test keys.

6. Going Live

Click the 'Go live' link in the console to start our go live process.