Request Payments

As a corporate client, you may wish to send payment requests to your customers, to prompt them to pay you for services rendered.

The EPC solution allows you to send outbound payment requests – request-to-pay, or RTP, messages – to your customers. The message must include the following information:

• The amount requested. You may also opt to allow the payer to pay more or less than the specified amount.
• The RTP expiry date.
• RTP status. The request-to-pay status changes throughout the transaction life cycle, depending on the scenario. For example, a status of PRESENTED means only that the RTP has been presented to the payer, while a status of ACCEPTED means that the payer has accepted the request and elected to make the payment.

You will therefore need to make use of an RTP Store, where the RTP status can be updated and stored as the transaction progresses. Electrum will retrieve the latest RTP status and information from the Store at various points during the transaction, for example, to verify that an RTP has not expired.

Once a customer receives the RTP, they can choose to accept the request (in which case their bank will initiate a payment to you) or they can decline the request (in which case no payment will be made).

The diagram below shows the basic transaction flow of an outbound request-to-pay resulting in an inbound payment.