Mass payout API for bulk and instant disbursements

A mass payout API is an interface your software calls to send money to many recipients at once. You post a payout request with an amount, a destination and a reference, or an array of them. We disburse the funds and report back the result of each one. No more manual transfers sitting in your finance team's queue.

It is also called a disbursement API, a bulk payout API or a transfers API. The same Boldrails endpoint handles one payment or a batch of thousands, so you wire bulk payouts and single transfers without a second integration.

This page is the developer reference: endpoints, authentication, webhooks and retry behaviour. If you want the business view of the same product, pricing, rails, batch limits and settlement, read our mass payouts page instead.

An account-to-account payout sends money from your balance to a person's own bank account over an instant bank scheme. It is the outbound leg of the same rail that account-to-account payments collect on. You send it as a fresh payout instruction, not as a reversal of something you took earlier.

A payout and a refund are different products, and most providers use the two words as if they were the same. A refund reverses a payment you already accepted, and on a bank rail that is available on managed settlement only. A payout goes to any recipient you are cleared to pay, whether or not they ever paid you. The distinction decides which one you can actually use, so it is worth getting right before you build.

Instant bank schemes run market by market. Nigeria has NIP, the euro area runs SEPA Instant and the United Kingdom runs Faster Payments. Those are the schemes as they exist in each market. Which rails we disburse over, and where, is set out in our acceptance index rather than restated here.

There is one practical gain when a payout follows a payment the same person made. The destination is the account their own bank already authenticated, so nobody re-keys an account number and the most common cause of a failed transfer never arises. That is the same recipient-resolution discipline we apply on every other rail.

In Nigeria, disbursing funds is restricted to CBN-licensed banks and payment service providers. You cannot move other people's money to bank accounts at scale without that licence.

Boldrails operates as a licensed principal provider: we hold our own payment licences and disburse to recipients directly. We are not a broker, and we do not route your payouts through third parties. Nigerian bank payouts clear over NIBSS rails (NIP).

We build for high-risk verticals other providers turn away, including iGaming, forex and crypto, at the capability level. The CBN also sets a Disaggregation of Bulk Payment rule for large batches; see mass payouts for how that rule works.