Quotes & Exchange

Key Timelines

When you create a new payment, we will return a payment quote which you have to accept within 5 minutes. You can accept the payment via the "Action a Payment" endpoint.

If a payment quote is accepted but there are insufficient funds in the account, the payment will enter the "Awaiting Funds" state. Under normal market circumstance, we will honor an accepted payment quote for an "Awaiting Funds" payment until 1pm HKT (Hong Kong Time) the next calendar day.

For more information, refer to Payment Creation & Lifecycle.

Account Configuration

When you finalize the commercial details of your Payments Program, we will configure the agreed upon pricing into your account. This includes the variable fees, FX spread, and fixed fees for each payment corridor, and they feed directly into the payment quotation math. If you have any questions about your quotes, please reach out to us.

Quote Breakdown

In the response received when you create a new payment, you will see several quote-related items:

fxInfo
- This section indicates the FX rate we are applying between the Receiving Currency and the Sender Currency, including any applicable FX spread.
- clientRate indicates how much of the Receiving Currency is provided for 1 unit of the Sender Currency
- baseSenderAmount shows how much Sender Currency is needed to send all of the Receiving Currency that we want the recipient to receive
feeInfo
- totalFee is a sum of the variable, fixed, and special fee variables
- Variable and Fixed fees will match what is in your commercial contract.
- Special fees are reserved for special situations where applicable, such as usage of premium features. Any special fees will be laid out in the commercial contract.
paymentInfo
- senderAmount, denominated in senderCurrency, is the sum of baseSenderAmount and totalFee
- senderAmount is how much of the senderCurrency needs to be provided to send the desired payment to the payment recipient, inclusive of all fees.

FX Rates Within the Quote

The FX rate is a key part of the payment quote. While we only show one FX rate, the calculated rate between the senderCurrency and the receivingCurrency, this may be a composite rate that under the hood contains two different exchange rates.

In fact, the only quote that wouldn't have fluctuating rates is USDC:USD, which we fix as 1:1. We use live rates and any applicable spreads to determine the rate for USDT:USD and USD:"other fiat currency" - thus, a USDT:"other fiat currency rate" is a single rate composite of these two underlying rates.

Exploring Foreign Exchange Rates

We understand the importance of knowing what the indicative foreign exchange (FX) rate is for an upcoming payment. Given this, we have created a "Get exchange rates" endpoint that intakes two variables:

fromCurrency: This is the same as senderCurrency in the "Create payment" endpoint
toCurrency: This is the same as receivingCurrency in the "Create payment" endpoint

When using this endpoint, no payment quote or other form of payment obligation is created.