A wire transfer is essential for the exchange to transfer funds into a merchant’s account upon a successful deposit (see deposit request). The merchant has to include the necessary information for the exchange to initiate the wire transfer.
The information required for wire transfer depends on the method of wire transfer used. Since the wire transfers differ for each region, we document here the ones currently supported by the exchange.
The “x-taler-bank” wire format is used for testing and for integration with Taler’s simple “bank” system which in the future might be useful to setup a bank for a local / regional currency or accounting system. Using the @code{x-taler-bank} wire method in combination with the Taler’s bank, it is thus possible to fully test the Taler system without using “real” currencies. The URL format for “x-taler-bank” is simple, in that it only specifies an account number and the URL of the bank:
- payto://x-taler-bank/BANK_URI/ACCOUNT_NUMBER
The account number given must be a positive 53-bit integer. As with any payto://-URI, additional fields may be present (after a ?), but are not required. The BANK_URI may include a port number. If none is given, @code{https} over port 443 is assumed. If a port number is given, @code{http} over the given port is to be used. Note that this means that you cannot run an x-taler-bank over @code{https} on a non-canonical port.
Note that a particular exchange is usually only supporting one particular bank with the “x-taler-bank” wire format, so it is not possible for a merchant with an account at a different bank to use “x-taler-bank” to transfer funds across banks. After all, this is for testing and not for real banking.
The “x-taler-bank” method is implemented by the @code{taler_bank} plugin.
The Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) [1] is a regulation for electronic payments. Since its adoption in 2012, all of the banks in the Eurozone and some banks in other countries adhere to this standard for sending and receiving payments. Note that the currency of the transfer will (currently) always be EUR. In case the receiving account is in a currency other than EURO, the receiving bank may covert the amount into that currency; currency exchange charges may be levied by the receiving bank.
For the merchant to receive deposits through SEPA, the deposit request must follow the payto:// specification for SEPA:
- payto://sepa/IBAN
The implementation of the @code{ebics} plugin which is envisioned to support the @code{sepa} method is currently incomplete. Specifically, we need a working implementation of libebics which is a sub-project trying to implement the EBICS [2] standard.
| [1] | SEPA - Single Euro Payments Area: http://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/sepa/html/index.en.html |
| [2] | EBCIS - European Banking Computer Interface Standard http://www.ebics.org/ |