Make a payment in the RippleNet Home UI

RippleNet Home offers a “New Payment” option for institutions that want to make payments manually in a web browser instead of making them through the RippleNet API.

Institutions that make frequent payments—hundreds or many thousands of payments a day—set up middleware that handles those payments through the RippleNet API. The API automates those payments because handling them one at a time through human operators is too cumbersome to be practical.

Some institutions make low-frequency payments such as bulk or treasury payments that might occur only a few times a day. These payments are easy to handle manually in RippleNet Home and don’t require setting up middleware to work through the RippleNet API.

Set up RippleNet Home for new payments

RippleNet Home does not, by default, have a new payment feature. If your institution would like to make new payments through RippleNet Home, contact your account representative. Ripple can configure RippleNet Home to display a New Payment button to authorized users in RippleNet Home’s Payments page. Click the button to open the New Payment page where you can specify and request a payment.

You must also have an established connection to at least one RippleNet partner institution to which you can send payments. Your customer partner engineer at Ripple handles connection setups. Once you have a connection to a payment partner, you can get information necessary for a payment: the partner’s RippleNet instance address and the names of one or more of the partner’s RippleNet accounts that you can use to receive your payments.

How a new payment works

These basic steps make a new payment through the New Payment page:

1. Specify the payment: define the receiver, currency and amount, where the amount applies, a payment method, and other payment attributes.
2. Request a quote for the specified payment.
3. View any returned quotes to see proposed payment attributes that include the route the payment takes, the exchange rate, and charged fees.
4. Accept a quote and follow through with approvals to see the payment through to completion.
5. Troubleshoot a payment if necessary in RippleNet Home ’s Payments page.

Payment parties

Before reading these instructions for making payments using RippleNet Home, make sure you are familiar with the terms we use to describe the participants in any payment transaction, specifically the originator (a human), sender (an institution), receiver (an institution), and the beneficiary (a human).

These are explained in Payment participants.

A walkthrough

This example steps through a simple new payment in RippleNet Home.

Specify your payment

Specifying your payment in a quote request is the main part of the new payment process.

The New Payment page

Open the New Payment page to start your new payment.

1. On the left side in RippleNet Home , click the Payments tab to open the Payments page.
2. On the upper right of the Payments page, click New Payment to open the New Payment page.

   

Basic payment values

The boxes that first appear on the page are enough to specify a quote request for a basic payment. A basic quote request uses default settings for parts of the request, defaults such as sender and receiver RippleNet accounts, beneficiary payment methods, and fees charged.

Define a basic payment using these boxes:

1. Choose a currency from the Payment Currency pulldown box.
2. Enter an amount in the Amount box.
3. Specify your receiver by choosing your receiving partner's RippleNet host (instance) from the Receiver RippleNet Host pulldown box.
4. Choose where your specified amount applies in the payment process by selecting a party in the Quote Type pulldown box. This is important because the payment process often involves fees and exchange rates so the amount can change at each stage:
   • Originator Amount is the amount the originator (your sending customer) provides. The amounts at all other stages are reckoned from this amount, typically after fees and exchange rates subtract value.
   • Beneficiary Amount is the amount the beneficiary (your receiving partner’s customer) receives. The amounts at all other stages are reckoned so that all intermediate revaluations result in this value.
   • Sender Institution Amount is the amount your institution sends. Downstream values are reckoned from this amount, as is the sending customer’s upstream amount.
   • Receiver Institution Amount is the amount your receiving partner receives. All other amounts are reckoned from before and after this point.
5. Inform your receiver of the payout method (cash, card credit, and so on) to use to pay the beneficiary with the Payment Method Setting boxes. Simple payments can use the default values of "No method" and "Other," which specify payment using the default payout method for the beneficiary. For more specific payout methods, read RippleNet Home payments reference .

Advanced Options

If you click on "Advanced Options," you'll see a set of boxes that let you define more involved quote requests. You can specify sender and receiver accounts, an exchange rate, fee charged, and other payment specifics. Here's how to specify an exchange rate and fee.

Specify a custom fee and exchange rate

You can specify a custom fee, a custom exchange rate, or both that must apply to the first stage (hop) of the path your payment takes through intermediate instances. Any payment quotes you receive must satisfy thefee and exchange rate you specify.

Note that a custom fee or exchange rate does not apply to On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) payments.

1. To specify a custom fee, check the Custom Fee box and fill in the amount of fee. This amount overrides a default fee setting defined for your RippleNet instance.
2. To specify a custom exchange rate (not applicable for ODL payments), check the Custom Rate box and then fill in values to define the rate:
   • Custom Rate is the ratio of the base currency to the counter currency. An example: 1.13 for the ratio of the Euro to the U.S. dollar (EUR/USD).
   • Rate Type specifies which currency is the base currency and which is the counter currency. Buyer sets the sent currency as the base currency and the received currency as the counter currency. Seller reverses these values.
   • Base currency specifies the currency to use as the base currency, specified using international currency codes.
   • Counter currency specifies the currency to use as the counter currency, again specified using international currency codes.

Request quotes and settle payment

Once you’ve specified the payment you want to make, request quotes for that payment, review returned quotes, accept one you like, and settle payment once the quote is locked in:

1. Click Get Quote . RippleNet finds payment options to fulfill your specifications. It determines possible routes to reach the receiving partner, which may go through intermediate institutions. RippleNet returns a set of one or more quotes that show available payment options including applicable fees and exchange rates. (This is typically a simple single-node route for ODL payments.)

   

2. If you find a payment quote you want, in the Optional Sender Information section add payment details required by the receiver. Your customer partner engineer can provide more information about these details.
3. Click Accept quote . The Payments page opens, showing your new payment at the top of the list.
4. Refresh the browser window as often as necessary to monitor the payment status. When the receiving institution locks in your accepted quote, the Settle button appears in your payment’s line.
5. Click Settle . The Payment Details window appears showing your payment’s status. It contains a Settle payment button in the upper right corner.

   

6. Click Settle payment . The Payments window appears again showing payment status as “Prepared.”
7. Refresh the browser window as often as necessary to monitor the payment status. When the receiver institution has accepted the payment, your payment status shows as “Completed.” To the best of the receiver’s knowledge, funds have gone through to the beneficiary.

Troubleshoot a payment

RippleNet Home’s Payments page shows your payment. You can click the payment ID to see payment details if you need to troubleshoot a payment that has hung up for any reason. The Payment Details page for a payment offers tabs that show the details of the payment (the Payment Object JSON tab) or the details of the event trail executed to carry out (or attempt to carry out) the payment (the Event Trail JSON tab).