Account Direct Debits

How It Works

Monnify Account Direct Debit is a simple, secure and convenient ‘pull’ payment method that allows merchants to automatically collect recurring payments from a payer directly from their Account.

Ways to Use

One of these four ways to use will be suitable for your business depending on your requirement.

• Open Flexible: Enable merchants to debit varying amounts from a customer's account based on the actual consumption of services or products without a predetermined end date.

• Open Fixed: Enable merchants to debit fixed amounts from a customer's account based on the actual consumption of services or products without a predetermined end date.

• Closed Flexible: Enable merchants to debit varying amounts from a customer's account based on the actual consumption of services or products with a predetermined end date.

• Closed Fixed: Enable merchants to debit fixed amounts from a customer's account based on the actual consumption of services or products with a predetermined end date.

Common Examples

Recurring Payment: Direct debit is ideal for managing recurring payments such as subscriptions, memberships, or regular bills.

Loan Repayments: Direct debit can facilitate the periodic debits on customer’s account for loan repayments.

Integration Workflow

The process of setting up a direct debit involves three key steps: the creation of a mandate by the merchant, its authorization by the customer, and the actual debiting of funds as per the mandate's terms.

• Creating a mandate: This process begins when a merchant makes a request to set up a direct debit with a customer’s account details.  Mandate creation  API is called and mandate will be pending authorization.

• Authorizing a mandate: This process entails the authorization of the mandate. The process of authorizing a mandate after initiation  is completed by the customer and the requirements are communicated as follows. 
  Authorization email sent directly by Monnify to the customers email address
  Authorization link returned from API response is sent by merchants to their customers

• Debiting a mandate: Once a mandate is authorized, the merchant can call  debits APIs to debit the account linked to the mandate as agreed in the consent arrangement. The APIs are designed to accommodate different use cases - be it fixed or flexible debits, open or closed mandates.
  

Mandate States

There are different possible states a mandate can be through its life cycle as captured in the mandate status parameter. They include:

PENDING: Mandate creation  is in progress.

PENDING AUTHORIZATION: Mandate is awaiting customer authorization using the authorizationLink in the mandate creation response parameter.

AUTHORIZATION EXPIRED: Mandate authorization expired as customer didn’t authorise it within the available timeframe.

ACTIVATED: Mandate has been activated.

Expired: Mandate has reached its expiration time.

CANCELLED: Mandate was cancelled by the Merchant.

SUSPENDED: Mandate was suspended by customer’s bank.