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PIS (Payment Initiation Service) APIs

Providing a Payment Initiation Service (PIS) means providing payment instruments and initiating payments directly from a customer’s bank account. They must explicitly give consent for the PISP to connect to the bank system and debit the payment account.

PIS documentation
PIS specifications
PIS endpoints and errors

PIS specifications

Here is information on where our implementation of PIS (Payment Initiation Service) APIs deviates from Open Banking specifications.

Below you can read about:

Payment sources
Payment types
Fields
Consent
Confirmation of funds
Sandbox payment execution
General specifications

Payment sources

We don't support payments from:

  • Credit card accounts
  • Savings accounts, where a payment reference is included with the payment request.

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Payment types

Domestic scheduled payments

We don’t support future dated payments which are:

  • Dated for today’s date
  • Dated for more than 2 years in the future
  • Dated for a weekend or bank holiday.

International payments

We don’t support international payments.

Domestic standing orders

We only support simple domestic standing orders. To set up domestic standing orders, we require the following mandatory parameters in the request:

  • Frequency
    • IntrvlWkDay:X:Y – acceptable values for X are (01,02,04), acceptable values for Y are (01-07), any others will be rejected. This will schedule payments to be made Weekly, Bi-Weekly or Four-Weekly on the day of your choosing. Any other values will be rejected
    • IntrvlMnthDay:X:Y – acceptable values for X are (01,02,03,06,12), acceptable values for Y are (01-31). This will schedule payments to be made Monthly, Bi-Monthly, Quarterly, Semi-Annually or Annually on the day of your choosing. Any other values will be rejected
  • Number of payments - acceptable in the range of 1 to 998, or if set as 999 it will be considered as continuous payment.
  • We do not support end dates for standing orders. So if PSU has requested an end date for the standing order, you will need to convert this into a number of payments based on the start date, frequency and requested end date.
  • First Payment Date & amount - we will use these as Recurring payment date and Recurring payment amount.
  • Reference.

We don’t accept and will reject requests which include:

  • Domestic standing orders from savings accounts
  • RecurringPaymentDate and FinalPaymentDate parameters.

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Fields

Character lengths

We accept the characters lengths stated in the Open Banking specification. However, our systems truncate values to the below for customer views and future transaction requests:

  • Payee Name field - max. 18 characters
  • Reference field - max. 18 characters.

Character values

For the following fields, we only support:

  • Amount field – values up to 19,999.99
  • Amount field – values up to 2 decimal places
  • Amount field – values in GBP
  • SchemeName field – value "UK.OBIE.SortCodeAccountNumber".

Accepted characters

We allow the following characters in the Payee Name and Reference fields in our mobile app, online banking and Open Banking services:

  • 0-9
  • A-Z
  • Underscore (_)
  • Hash (#)
  • Comma (,)
  • Hyphen (-)
  • Space

We don’t allow the following special characters:

  • Semicolon (;)
  • Euro symbol (€)
  • Less than (<)
  • Greater than (>)

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Consent

You can ask the PSU to select which bank account they would like to use for payment before initiating the consent process, then provide this as part of the request. Otherwise, we will ask the PSU to select the bank account during the consent process.

As part of the PIS consent process, you will redirect PSU (customer) to The Co-operative Bank or smile login page, where they can authenticate themselves using our Online Banking services or Mobile App. They will then be able to provide consent after which they will be re-directed back to the PISP. Then the PSU will see:

  • A payment details page, detailing the amount which will be paid to the merchant or PISP, and the PSU’s bank account details
  • The option to select which account to debit (if not already provided as part of the request)
  • The option to either click ‘Continue’ or ‘Cancel’ buttons.

Confirmation of funds

We support allowing a PISP to complete a Confirmation of funds check before using the consent to request us to execute the payment. For further information view our PIS documentation.

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Sandbox payment execution

When executing PIS payment transactions in the Sandbox environment:

  • Transactions will not affect the actual account balance of a PSU, irrespective of the number of times the TPP invokes the payment APIs
  • Transactions of less than £19,000 will allow consent
  • Transactions of £19,000 or more, and up to £19,999.99, will generate the 'Payment Limit Exceeded' OAuth2.0 redirection error, following successful authentication.

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General specifications

To read about settings and specifications which apply to all of our APIs, see our general specifications.

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