Create an outbound payment
There are two types of outbound payments you can create: regular outbound payments (sent to the recipient you specify), withdrawals (transferred to your verified business bank account).
Regular outbound payments
Let’s create your first outbound payment. At a minimum, you need to specify the following details:
amountin minor units (e.g., pence for GBP, cents for EUR).scheme- the payment scheme you want to use.recipient_bank_account- your customer bank account id.
Here’s an example to guide you:
1POST https://api.gocardless.com/outbound_payments HTTP/1.1
2{
3 "outbound_payments": {
4 "amount": 10000,
5 "scheme": "faster_payments",
6 "description": "Affiliate Program Payout – January",
7 "links": {
8 "recipient_bank_account": "BA0001AA111AAA"
9 }
10 }
11}Withdrawals
It's important to note that withdrawals are essentially regular outbound payments, following the same lifecycle, events, creation and cancellation process, and other behaviours. The only difference is that withdrawals will be send to your nominated (and verified) bank account. We created a separate endpoint for convenience, as you don’t need to specify a recipient.
Withdrawals are useful when you wish to get an amount of funds out of your Payment Account. This is particularly relevant for organisations using the "from collections" model to top up their Payment Account. In this model, payouts from Collections get paid out into your Payment Account, meaning the funds will keep accumulating there, unless a withdrawal is made.
We will also automatically pay out all “unassigned funds” into your nominated (and verified) business bank account quarterly. This will happen on the first Tuesday of each January, April, July, and October.
Here’s an example of creating a withdrawal:
1POST https://api.gocardless.com/outbound_payments/withdrawal HTTP/1.1
2{
3 "outbound_payments": {
4 "amount": 10000,
5 "scheme": "faster_payments",
6 "description": "Surplus Payout January"
7 }
8}Scheduling of future-dated outbound payments
In the standard scenario for "instant" schemes (such as "Faster Payments"), your outbound payment will be sent immediately and typically reach the recipient's bank account within seconds (in rare cases, it may take up to a few hours). However, there may be instances where you want to schedule the payment for a specific date in the future. To schedule an outbound payment or a withdrawal in the future, simply set the execution_date to your desired date:
1POST https://api.gocardless.com/outbound_payments HTTP/1.1
2{
3 "outbound_payments": {
4 "amount": 10000,
5 "scheme": "faster_payments",
6 "description": "Affiliate Program Payout – January",
7 "execution_date": "2025-01-01",
8 "links": {
9 "recipient_bank_account": "BA0001AA111AAA"
10 }
11 }
12}