Disbursements
Disbursements refer to the transfer of payments made to a business by customers over a 24-hour period to the business's bank account.
You receive all Pay by Bank payments made to your business from your customers over a 24-hour period (minus any refunds you initiate, of course). These payments are then transferred in one payout to your bank account. This transfer is called a disbursement.
Disbursements appear in a business's bank account looking like they have been received from the business itself since Zopa disburses payouts to the bank account tied to a business's legal name.
Note: Other names for this transfer are Settlement and/or Payout.
What is the frequency of these disbursements?
Your account balance will be disbursed each 24-hour cycle at Midnight UTC (this is the same time as Midnight GMT). Shortly after, the money will appear in your designated bank account.
The quality thing here is that Pay by Bank payments are on a disbursement schedule of 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
What would prevent me from getting a disbursement?
There are a few reasons why you may receive your disbursements later:
- If your account balance is £0, the disbursement payout will be rolled over to the next 24-hour period, meaning that nothing will be issued until the balance in the account is positive.
- If you have any pending refunds, the disbursement payout will be paused until either enough funds accrue to fulfil the refunds, or the refunds fail (after 3 days). Thereafter, disbursements will resume as normal.
Detail on Pay by Bank disbursement timelines
- Pay by Bank runs on the UK Faster Payment Service (FPS) rails in the UK which ordinarily means fast settlement on the same day.
- This means that typically Zopa will get a confirmed status from the FPS rail between 3-15 seconds after the customer authorises. Whilst we're waiting for this, your customer will see 'Payment being Processed' in yellow on the confirmation screen UI and then 'Payment Successful' in green on the confirmation screen UI.
- In your Merchant Dashboard you will see the statuses as 'Pending' and then 'Approved' subject to the funds being received.
- We trigger the URL redirects a few seconds after display whereby you will see the Pending URL.
- We then wait for the funds to arrive and be acknowledged in your Zopa Merchant Account (where it is 'batched' before disbursement overnight) - this is typically 45 seconds after your customer authorises the transaction.
- At this point we trigger a webhook to update the payment as completed - this is typically what eCommerce sites use to move the order into a shippable state. This is the point we move the payment to 'Approved'
- There is a rare edge case here to be aware. 98% of our Pay by Bank transactions complete inside 15 seconds, however the FPS rail does allow for 'Long Running Transactions' which can take up to 2 days. These will remain in this async 'Pending' state until funds are received into your Zopa Merchant Account. Merchants typically accept the order on their order confirmation page, sometimes letting the customer know they're waiting for funds to arrive, and then they move the order to the shippable state once the webhook triggers on funds arrival.
How can I check my account balance?
At this time, there’s no way to directly view your current balance. We hope to have this feature available soon, so please keep checking in.
For now, we suggest taking a look at your Orders from today in the Dashboard.
You can also reach out to us via email at support@rvvup.com for specific questions about fund movement.
How will this disbursement appear on my bank statement? / Why does the payout look like it came from me?
At first glance, seeing the disbursement hit your bank account marked with your business’s name may be confusing. This is because Zopa disburses your payout to your bank account using your business’s legal name.
When we send a payout from your account, it appears in your bank account looking like it has been received from well… yourself! Which it has… As Zopa sends it to the bank account tied to your business’s legal name.
Sample Bank Statement
A disbursement from Zopa will appear with the identifier:
Zopa DB<unique_ID_number>
Note: While a transaction from Zopa will have the prefix “DB” and can be sorted, the numerical characters displayed are internal properties to Zopa.