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Ask HN: UK Based API for Payouts

1 points by florincm ↗ HN
I'm currently working on a UK startup and i'm struggling to find a solution for easily paying out my clients.

We need to pay our clients every 2 weeks, and our only solution at this moment is to manually send payments via online banking. Batch payments are limited to 50 accounts and every new account needs to validated via the pin-entry system which is very slow.

We expect to have a quick increase and payouts having to pay over 100 people with different amounts and the process currently is slow and time consuming and i’m trying to find a way around it. I’ve had several calls with my bank and several departments with no success.

Does anyone know a UK api/service that can help me achieve my goal so we can create e custom system for paying out using sort-code and account number?

We bank with Barclays.

Thank you.

6 comments

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scrollaway
If you're expecting heavy usage, you can talk to your bank, they'll listen and likely help. You can also talk to the Mondo guys (https://getmondo.co.uk/) who have been recently working on building their API... but I'm not sure it'll be usable for you yet.
florincm
I've spoken to my bank. No clear answer from them. From my research online there is a service called barclays.net but the fees are high and they provide an outdated software platform with a usb pin-entry system. And none was clear enough to explain if it meets my requirements, on customer support.

Regarding Mongo, i've read somewhere that they don't provide business accounts yet. I've signed up for a personal account and i'm in a queue so far. Also their api has not endpoint for sending payments from what i've seen.

The closest thing i could find to meet my requirements is their private api they use under their mobile banking app, but is heavily secured, and there no chance they will ever give access to that, or allow me to use it.

And yes i expect heavy usage.

scrollaway
Have you reached out to Mondo directly? info@, or jason@ for the CCO.
florincm
no, but i will try and see where that gets me.
brudgers
Why not hire a book keeper or accountant on contract? 100 payments twice a month is not a high volume.

But I'd add that close attention to the inflow and outflow of a company is a critical management function. It's the sort of knowledge that should be very detailed and up to date not vague and requiring grepping of logs.

Good luck.

txsl
If you are willing to switch banks, I'm aware of Natwest's Bankline, which takes in a CSV like file and you then authorise the whole tranche.

Does Barclays accept payment requests on paper? You could generate files which you can hand to them and ask to process.

Also come across something called Envoy Transfers before, which is somehow related to Worldpay. When I was being paid via a freelancing platform, I put my bank details into their (Envoy Transfer's) site.