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Payments Canada Developer Portal

RTR Sandbox API

The Real-Time Rail (RTR) will support faster payments 24/7/365 that are irrevocable (meaning cannot be undone), and use the ISO 20022 financial messaging standard for all transactions. The real-time movement of funds from one account to another will be a new capability for Canada. 

Participants on the RTR will be able to connect and develop new ways for Canadian consumers, businesses and governments to pay for goods and services, transfer money and better compete nationally and internationally. 

About the RTR Sandbox API

Payments Canada’s RTR API sandbox allows developers to explore and create against API functionality user test data. These APIs will help businesses prepare for the launch of the RTR.

The benefits of using the APIs in a sandbox environment:

  • Exploration and experimentation: A safe, secure environment to test RTR APIs
  • System visualization: Understand the RTR and its capabilities prior to go-live
  • Simplified onboarding: Ease of integration with the RTR at go-live
  • Business opportunities: The RTR APIs will create opportunities for users to build their own use cases for the RTR
  • Innovation: RTR use cases will lead to early API and product development
  • Single and public source of truth: An open testing environment means developers have access to the documentation and information they need to innovate and collaborate

Leveraging the ISO 20022 messaging standard

Payments Canada leveraged the best practices of other jurisdictions, and worked collaboratively with the industry to develop the RTR-specific ISO 20022 message specifications. These specifications will allow RTR participants to prepare their existing applications to leverage the value of the ISO 20022 messaging standard at RTR go-live.

Vendors that support Canada’s payments ecosystem can use the published messages to update their applications and develop new services for RTR participants and the wider ecosystem. ISO 20022 messaging will allow for access to enhanced remittance data, support for global interoperability, and improved transparency in payment details.

The RTR Sandbox includes the following APIs:

Exchange Inbound

Send payment: This service can be used by a RTR Participant/Connection Service Provider (CSP) to send a new RTR Payment to another RTR Participant using ISO 20022 pacs.008 (Customer Credit Transfer) message format. RTR Exchange should respond with pacs.002 (Payment Status Report) but can also send an admi.002 (Message Reject) in case of syntax validation failure.

Payment enquiry: This service can be used by a RTR Participant/Connection Service Provider (CSP) to send a Payment Status Report Enquiry using ISO 20022 pacs.028 (Payment Status Request) message format. RTR Exchange should respond with pacs.002 (Payment Status Report) but can also send an admi.002 (Message Reject) in case of syntax validation failure.

Heartbeat: This service is used to send heartbeat requests by RTR Participant/Connection Service Providers (CSP) to RTR Exchange using ISO 20022 admi.004 (System Event Notification) message format. Exchange should respond with admi.011 (System Event Acknowledgement) but can also send an admi.002 (Message Reject) in case of syntax validation failure.

Clearing & Settlement Inbound

Interest report: This service can be used by the Participants to get an Interest Report request from the RTR Clearing and Settlement using ISO 20022 camt.003 (Get Account) message format. RTR C&S should respond with camt.004 (Return Account) containing Interest report of the participant’s settlement account, but can also send an admi.002 (Message Reject) in case of syntax validation failure.

Balance report: This service can be used by the Participants to get a Balance Report from the RTR C&S using ISO 20022 camt.003 (Get Account) message format. RTR C&S should respond with camt.004 (Return Account) containing balance report of the participant’s settlement account, but can also send an admi.002 (Message Reject) in case of syntax validation failure.

Current RTR sandbox APIs


Code Samples / Postman Collections

Our public github repo contains code samples for a variety of programming 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.