Internal finance automation

Airwallex Payouts can be leveraged in a variety of use cases which involve global movement of funds. The use case described in this section is targeted towards businesses considering making payouts for their own business purposes.

For example, enterprises operating at scale can increase their financial efficiency by managing payables (such as invoices and payrolls) centrally and and make programmatic payments, which requires adopting off-the-shelf or custom-built finance systems and integrating to payment providers. We consider such use cases as internal finance automation.

Let’s say you are a large company and you have built an internal finance system or interface that allows your finance team to manage global accounts payables. You are looking to integrate with a payments provider that allows your finance team members to set up invoice payments in the system to be paid out automatically.

The high-level user journey looks like the following:

1. A finance team member sets up payout information and makes the invoice payments.
2. Internal finance system makes automatic payouts using the payment provider.
3. Finance team members are given updates on the status of payouts via the internal finance system.

Collecting payout information

The first step is making sure that the system can know to which country and in what currency the invoice payment is being made. This usually comes as part of the invoice information. Then you can use the API or form schemas to provide options on payment methods. With the payment method decided, you can further use the API or form schemas to render a form that collects required information such as bank account details, beneficiary information, which becomes part of the vendor information that you save to your system.

Previewing payouts

With payment amount in target currency available as part of the invoice information and a pre-determined source currency (usually your domestic currency), you can retrieve an indicative MarketFX quote API to provide a preview of the payment for the user before confirming it. You should also be able to provide an ETA on the payment if you used the form schema to retrieve payment method information.

Funding payouts

In pre-funding mode, you will need to ensure that the Airwallex account from which you are sending the funds has sufficient wallet balance in the source currency, otherwise you will encounter an error when creating the payout.

Creating and tracking payouts

Once the user has confirmed the payout, your system will create a new payment API. At this point, there may be errors that you need to handle. Once the payout is successfully created, you will be able to track the statuses of the payout by subscribing to webhook events.

The sequence above is a simple and straightforward sequence of interactions. Please refer to the documentations below for more features and integration options you can leverage in your integration design.