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Correspondent payouts

Make cross-border payments on behalf of your customers.

With Wise Platform, licensed banks and financial institutions that want to execute transactions on their customer’s behalf integrate with Wise Platform as a Correspondent partner

.

For Correspondent partners, transfers are funded from your Wise Nostro account

or other agreed funding source.

Before you begin

  • Complete your one-time account and profile setup so you have your user access tokens and profile ID.
  • Understand the scope of your integration. You’ll work closely with your Wise implementation team to determine scope, which includes supported currency corridors, payment rails, and funding and settlement methods.

Sending money

The send money flow for Correspondent partners differs from the standard send money flow at the step for creating a transfer. Correspondent partners must send a create third party transfer request instead of the standard create transfer request. The body of the third party transfer request includes the required originator object, which identifies the ultimate sender of funds, and the originalTransferId for idempotency.

  • The originator.reference field is the unique sender identifier that must be the same for every transfer from this sender. This is how Wise identifies each originator for compliance purposes.
  • The originalTransferId is a unique value you generate that identifies each transfer, for idempotency and internal reference purposes.

As a Correspondent partner, you can choose to do the recipient-first or quote-first flow.

Recipient-firstQuote-first
Follow the send guides in this order when building the recipient-first flow:
  1. List or create recipients
  2. Create a quote
  3. Create a third party transfer
  4. Fund the transfer
Follow the send guides in this order when building the quote-first flow:
  1. Create a quote
  2. List or create recipients
  3. Update the quote
  4. Create a third party transfer
  5. Fund the transfer

Tracking transfers

Subscribe to webhooks for real-time updates about transfer state changes, rather than repeatedly polling the API. See the Tracking transfers guide for webhook specifics and payload examples.

Regardless of integration model, every integration should subscribe to:

  • transfers#state-change to track where the transfer is in its lifecycle.
  • transfers#refund to know when a refund has occurred on a transfer.
  • transfers#payout-failure to know when a payout fails and take appropriate action.

If you fund transfers from your Wise Nostro account (a balance account), also subscribe to balances#update to receive notifications about changes to your balance accounts.

Testing

Wise provides a sandbox environment with simulation endpoints to test key actions as you develop your integration. For testing Correspondent partner integrations, Wise recommends the following:

  • Use sandbox credentials and endpoints to test creating recipients, quotes, and third-party transfers end-to-end.
  • Validate corridor-specific behaviors, for example:
    • Recipient address requirements
    • Transfer purpose
    • BRL transfer nature on quotes
    • Blocking “global currencies”
  • Test transfer tracking with state-change simulation endpoints and verify your webhook handler.
  • If you fund from a balance, test balance debit webhooks and reconciliation workflows.

Common pitfalls to avoid

We have found the most common situations causing issues with correspondent integrations to be:

  • Using unauthenticated quotes for pricing. Always use authenticated quotes to reflect partner-specific pricing.
  • Skipping the update quote step in quote-first flows after recipient selection.
  • Allowing customers to select out-of-scope corridors or recipient types, leading to transfer creation failures.
  • Hardcoding forms without a process to update corridor requirements when they change.
  • Creating a standard transfer rather than a third party transfer.
  • Omitting originalTransferId for idempotency on third-party transfer creation.