FAQs Payments Hub questions

Payments Hub is Santander's cloud solution providing domestic and cross-border payment transfers to banks, fintechs, and businesses. It offers real-time payment capabilities through single, easy API integration.

No. Although the Payments Hub API’s request and response bodies follow the ISO20022 standard, the API documentation fully explains the body structure and content, providing you with all the information you need.

Each operation uses a different ISO message, performing a different payment-related action. To select the correct operation, you need to know which action you want to perform, and which payment scheme you want to use. For more information on how to select the operation, see Determining which API operation you need .

The sandbox is a testing environment that allows you to try out different API requests and see the kind of response the API returns. For more information, see the tutorials and the Payments Hub quick reference .

The Payments Hub sandbox returns standard responses, which do not necessarily reflect the request details. In all requests that use the Payments Hub ID as a path parameter, the sandbox accepts any ID value.

To authenticate your API calls, you need to provide a JSON Web Token (JWT) Bearer token in all authentication requests and POST-type payment requests. The token must be signed with the private key of your public-private key pair.

The JSON Web Token (JWT) Bearer tokens are used to authenticate your API requests:

In the authentication requests, the token is used to confirm that the requests are coming from you.

In the POST-type payment requests, the token is used to confirm that the request body has not been tampered with and exactly matches the request body included in the token.

The tutorials and Postman collection provide predefined JSON Web Token (JWT) Bearer tokens that can be used in the sandbox to try out Payments Hub requests.

However, in the POST-type payment requests, the request body must match exactly with the content used in the hd claim within the token. This means that if you make any changes in the request body used in the tutorial or Postman collection, the request fails, since the request body no longer matches with the token. If you want to modify the request body in the sandbox, you need to generate a new matching token for the request.

You can generate your JSON Web Token (JWT) Bearer tokens using any method that suits you. To verify that your generation method creates a valid token, generate a token based on the request body provided in one of the tutorials , and decrypt the token using, for example, the JWT debugger at https://jwt.io . The "hd" claim in the decrypted token must match the request body.

The processing time depends on the payment scheme you are using.

For example, SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) and Faster Payments (FP) operations are usually processed in a few seconds, while BACS and TARGET2 operations can take up to a few days.

You can use API requests to retrieve information about payments that you have initiated. The notifications can be configured to be Webhook notifications (containing URLs to be used as GET requests to retrieve the original payment or status report) or payment notifications (containing the original payment or status report).

• Payment refunds are related to a situation where the debtor originally made the payment on purpose, but now wants it refunded, for example, because the product they purchased is damaged or they simply want to return it. The creditor can decide the refund amount so long as it is less than the original payment.

• Payment returns are used when the creditor does not want to receive the original payment for some reason. For example, they have run out of the product they are selling and they want to return the payment in full to the debtor.

• A payment is cancelled when the debtor changes their mind about the original payment and requests to have their money back from the creditor. For example, the debtor may notice that they have made a mistake in the payment details.