Banking API: Testing Payment Rail Options in Treasury Prime’s Sandbox

Payment Rails

Payment rails are core features of any fintech or embedded banking app. Your company’s choice of payment options determines how fast users can send or receive money and with whom. With Treasury Prime’s modern RESTful interface, you can quickly implement payment rails and test them before your product goes live. Our banking API simplifies the process of developing banking products so that developers can focus on the bigger task of creating innovative applications.  

With Treasury Prime’s Sandbox, developers can simulate different payment rails without having to open bank accounts. That means you can see how payment rails will look and operate within your app without the hassle of opening a real bank account and transmitting real funds. 

Whether you’re testing payment rails or implementing them for real, you can follow the same guides from Treasury Prime. The only big difference is that to test payments, you will want to work within our Sandbox. 

Here's the background on each payment rail, with links to instructions on how to test them. That way, you can understand what it is that you are testing and how it should look. 

ACH - Automated Clearing House Transfer

ACH or automated clearing house transfers are cheap and widely-accepted payment rails, making them a baseline feature for many financial and banking apps. The transfers happen from one bank account to another. All banks can send or receive ACH transfers, and the transfers cost only pennies to complete.  

When an ACH transfer is initiated, the funds travel from one bank account to a clearinghouse where they sit in a batch with other transfers and await a pre-scheduled transfer to the receiving account. 

When a user sends out an ACH payment or pushes it out from their bank account, that is referred to as an ACH debit transaction. When a user pulls an ACH payment from another user’s bank account, that is called an ACH credit transaction. 

Learn how to implement or simulate ACH payments in Treasury Prime’s API Guides. 

The same instructions apply whether you are implementing ACH in your actual product, or simulating it in Treasury Prime’s Sandbox. 

• ACH origination
• ACH transfers
• Incoming ACH
• Testing ACH
• Sending ACH using Plaid — this option allows you to use Plaid Link to send ACH to authenticated bank accounts, without needing to handle account numbers directly

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Wire Transfer

Wire transfers are favored for large transactions because the bank or financial services firm handling the transfer guarantees its delivery. Banks will often charge as much as $10 or $20 per transaction. Wire transfers can happen faster than ACH transfers because they are direct and do not go through a clearing house. 

In addition to wiring money directly from one bank account to another, people can wire money through companies like Western Union and Moneygram, which send the wires through their own networks. These companies can pull money from a customer’s bank account or accept cash from them, and can transmit the funds either to the receiving customer’s bank account or in the form of cash which the person picks up at a Western Union or Moneygram location. 

Learn how to test wire transfers.

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Book transfer

A book transfer is when one user transfers funds from their bank account to the account of another customer of the same bank. Because book transfers happen within the same bank and/or within the same fintech app, they can be instant or at least be made to appear instant to end users. Book transfers are also inexpensive – often, they’re free. 

Learn how to implement book transfers or simulate them.

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Debit Cards

Debit cards are the most common and most preferred method of payment in the US. Treasury Prime allows fintechs to issue physical, virtual, and digital cards. Digital cards can be embedded in digital wallets like Apple Pay. With Treasury Prime, you can simulate all relevant card scenarios — card issuing, card management, card declines, ATM transactions, and more. Read more in our Guides:

• ATM transactions
• Card issuing and fulfillment
• Issuing a card
• Card management
• Card events
• Card declines
• Managing card auth
• Testing cards
• Apple Pay

Want to try it out for yourself?  Go to Treasury Prime’s Sandbox and start simulating payment rails immediately. Have questions about how you can get to market quickly with Treasury Prime’s modern banking API? Our team would be happy to connect with you. ‍

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