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 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 origin (domain and optionally a port) of the bank:
payto://x-taler-bank/BANK_URI/ACCOUNT_IDENTIFIER
The account identifier given must be a non-empty alphanumeric ASCII string. 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, https over port 443 is assumed. If a port number is
given, http over the given port is to be used. Note that this
means that you cannot run an x-taler-bank over 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 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 EUR, 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
| [1] | SEPA - Single Euro Payments Area: http://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/sepa/html/index.en.html |