Welcome to the Payments Canada API Developer Portal. This guide will help you become familiar with Payments Canada APIs and enable you to integrate them with your applications. A high-level description of the overall process is shown below:

API Catalogue

The API Catalogue is a detailed list of the products (e.g., Financial Institution File) and product-specific APIs offered by Payments Canada. Each API specification includes the API description, API URL, and Payload details (header, request parameters, response, error codes). With proper authentication, any user can test API connectivity through the catalogue.

Registration

You need to register to access and consume Payments Canada APIs.

• Navigate to the Registration Page and complete and submit the form.
• After you submit the form, we will send you an email containing the information you need to set up a password for your account and complete your registration.
• Once you’ve successfully completed your account registration, we will send you a confirmation email. This email will include the Terms and Conditions you’ve agreed to.
• As a registered user, you will have access to Sandbox APIs, My Apps and Production Requests.

Sandbox

Once you’ve successfully registered, you will have access to product-specific Sandbox APIs. You can use these to become familiar with the API specifications, authentication, request parameters, mocked response and error codes. Sandbox APIs call endpoints containing stubbed non-production data. Sandbox APIs cannot call production databases and are used for integration and testing.

My Apps

As a registered user, you can create Apps for the Sandbox APIs or Production APIs offered by Payments Canada from My Apps. Each App holds a unique Consumer Key and Consumer Secret. Here is a "How-to" guide for creating an App.

Authentication

Here is a high level illustration of the Authentication process for calling an API.

Before calling an API, you need to generate an access token using the unique Consumer Key and Consumer Secret from your App. The Consumer Key and Consumer Secret for each App you create can be found in My Apps. You can generate the access token using the access token generation API document listed under the APIs section. Here is a "How-to" guide for generating an access token for an App.

Trying Out An API

Registered users can try out our Sandbox APIs. To try out a Sandbox API, create an app associated with a product under the My Apps page. Navigate to the corresponding API documentation for that product, select the product-specific app you've created into the OAuth 2.0, generate oauth token and send the request. Sandbox APIs call on stubbed data and do not communicate with our production databases.To access production data, you need to submit a production request to Payments Canada. Here is a "How-to" guide for trying out an API through Payments Canada developer portal.

Production Request

You need to request production access to product-specific APIs (e.g., Financial Institution File) before you can consume them. To submit a production request, you will need to fill out and submit a production request form. We will review your request and contact you to guide you through the process. If your request is approved, you can create Apps that call the production APIs leveraging the same methodology as  done for the sandbox APIs.

Code Samples / Postman Collections

Our public github repo contains code samples for a variety of programing languages and frameworks. Includes code integration to our sandbox APIs for basic applications. Useful for developers to picture the end to end (e2e) flow of an API. Included is a Postman collection which can be cloned and imported to your Postman application.

Disclaimer: Comes with no guarantee nor support and is not production ready.