Introduction to Interface to ClearBank Payment Gateway

The purpose of this document is to provide an overview of the UK Faster Payments flow between the Temenos Payments Solution and UKFPS Gateway Service provider ClearBank.

When a bank is not a direct participant of FPS clearing, they will need to use the ClearBank service, which will act as an intermediary between the bank and FPS clearing.

The functionality translates the message format used or accepted by TPH and the message format used by ClearBank to interface with their clients. When a bank is not a direct participant in FPS clearing, the message has to be sent via ClearBank. ClearBank only accepts messages in their own format (Json).

For outgoing messages, the TPH solution will generate a PACS raw IF event XML message whenever the FPS payment is generated, the message will be transformed from a PACS raw IF event XML message format to a Json format so that the message will be accepted by the ClearBank interface. Similarly, for incoming messages, the message will be received in Json format and the solution will transform it to TPH generic format XML so that the message will be processed by TPH. The same process is used for account opening and virtual account opening, because every time an account is created, a message in Json format needs to be sent to ClearBank.

ClearBank’s Financial Institution Application Programming Interface (API) can be connected to by Financial Institutions (FI), Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) regulated businesses and FinTechs in order to leverage access to the ClearBank’s banking facilities and services.

Temenos Transact provides interfacing APIs to support ClearBank FPS which involves virtual account creation and payment messages. It also supports incoming and outgoing requests. The payment messages are instant credit transfer requests and the authentication is performed using a digital signature. The incoming messages to Temenos Transact are received in the form of webhooks.