Real-time payments #

The RTP® Network is a payments system that was launched by The Clearing House in 2017 as the newest payment rail in the U.S. since the advent of the ACH Network. Payment speed and availability are the primary benefits of utilizing the RTP® Network, as businesses can send and receive payments to eligible bank accounts 24/7/365. In addition, RTP transfers come with other favorable characteristics, such as greater transparency of payment status that provides confirmation of funds availability to the end user sending or receiving a payment.

The core of the Dwolla Platform was built around a simplified connection to the U.S. banking infrastructure for businesses to easily initiate digital payments via the ACH Network. As the Dwolla Platform evolves, RTP adds a new processing channel for businesses, providing flexible payment capabilities to build within their own applications.

While RTP and ACH are similar in many ways, there are some key differences:

Use cases and characteristics #

The RTP® Network supports credit “push” transfers, whereas ACH supports credit push as well as debit pull transfers. RTP is particularly suited to support disbursement use cases. Whether your business is built around B2B, B2C or a combination, you can power your application with RTP.

• Balance Funded Transfers - The RTP® Network is a good funds model, and to initiate transfers through the Dwolla Platform, funds must be available in the sender’s Dwolla balance.
• Credit Sends Only - RTP transactions are all credits. The RTP® Network does include “Requests for Payment,” but only a very small number of financial institutions support this, and it still relies on a credit to be initiated by the payer upon receiving the request. As adoption of Request for Payment increases among businesses, we expect more FIs will support this feature.
• RTP Enabled Financial Institutions - More than 56% of FIs support RTP, with adoption growing at an aggressive pace.

Identifying an RTP-enabled Funding Source #

On the Dwolla Platform, Funding Sources allow bank accounts to be added or retrieved. Available for both a Dwolla Master Account and Customers (end users) resources, funding sources have represented payment accounts used for ACH, Wire, and/or Push-to-Debit activities. Dwolla will be able to identify a bank account as RTP-enabled upon creation of a Funding Source, so no additional information is needed from your end users or application.

Retrieving an RTP-enabled Funding Source

When retrieving an existing Funding Source resource from the API, the response will contain a “channels” attribute which represents the different capabilities available for transfers. For a bank account, historically the only values available have been “ach” and “wire”. The example below represents how “real-time-payments” is returned within the “channels” array to identify an RTP-eligible account.

"channels": [
  "ach",
  "real-time-payments"
]

Initiating an RTP credit transfer #

In order to initiate a transfer with RTP processing, an optional processingChannel JSON object must be included in the transfer request. The processingChannel object contains the destination key with a value of real-time-payments. This processingChannel object will be returned when retrieving the transfer from the API. Specifying the destination processingChannel with real-time-payments will require a permission to be enabled.

An optional rtpDetails object can be included in the transfer request body. This allows additional information to be passed to the payment recipient's bank account about their RTP credit transfer.

Check out our guide to learn how you can simulate an RTP transfer in Sandbox.

The following example assumes the sending party has funds pre-loaded to their balance Funding Source and that the destination party has a bank account connected that is RTP-enabled.

var requestBody = {
  _links: {
    source: {
      href: "https://api-sandbox.dwolla.com/funding-sources/b268f6b9-db3b-4ecc-83a2-8823a53ec8b7",
    },
    destination: {
      href: "https://api-sandbox.dwolla.com/funding-sources/ecf993e2-fa22-4cea-8022-c7861200288f",
    },
  },
  amount: {
    currency: "USD",
    value: "10000.00",
  },
  processingChannel: {
    destination: "real-time-payments",
  },
  rtpDetails: {
    destination: {
      remittanceData: "ABC_123 Remittance Data",
    },
  },
};

dwolla
  .post("transfers", requestBody)
  .then((res) => res.headers.get("location")); // => 'https://api.dwolla.com/transfers/636de847-7d02-e711-80ee-0aa34a9b2388'

Retrieving an RTP credit transfer #

When retrieving the transfer from the API, the response will contain an rtpDetails object. Within the rtpDetails object will be a destination JSON object that includes a remittanceData key-value pair, depending on if it was included in the original RTP transfer request, and a networkId key-value pair.

The networkId is a unique identifier for an RTP credit transfer which is passed in the payment request to the recipient's bank. It appears on the transfer API resource once the credit entry clears into the destination bank account.

Request and response #

var transferUrl =
  "https://api.dwolla.com/transfers/243fd252-3fcf-eb11-8134-d050ab358a03";

dwolla.get(transferUrl).then(function (res) {
  res.body.status; // => 'processed'
});

Webhook notifications #

Webhooks notification events will be processed in the same sequence as an ACH transfer. The primary difference is that once the transfer is created, the completion or failure events will be triggered moments later rather than days. The specific events include -

*Based on responses from TCH and Cross River Bank, we will provide more descriptive failure reasons.

Error Codes #

Error codes provide the reason a message did not complete and can be found on the payment Result.Code. The Result.Code will be OK if the payment was successfully sent/received.