Payment Card Advance Documentation

Overview

Upward provides a seamless and secure way for businesses to offer cash advances to their consumers. This page shows exactly which API calls partners should make to use the advance feature. All calls are scoped to the authenticated Partner; accounts must belong to (or be valid for) that Partner. All advances are withdrawn from the Partner’s FBO account and deposited into the consumer’s account.

Payments Workflow

1. Get Auth Token

Step one of the workflow is to get an auth token to perform this action. The token scope needed to perform this action is api:write or api:purchase:write
SEE Auth API

2. Create An Advance

Partners that want to give early cash advance to consumes needs to have access to two properties.

  1. Id of the partner FBO account
  2. Id of the consumer bank account

Partners need to set the memo field to card.advance

Advances are triggered from the partner FBO account to consumers account. Partner will be able to see all advances in the Upward dashboard provides. Upward will provide retrieving a list of advances via api in 2026.

Example POST message to /v2/payments/transfer to initiate a Card Advance.

1{
2  "originating_account_id": "d2c5994c-f872-40da-a14d-369a834f4506",
3  "receiving_account_id": "315f1145-aee1-4978-ab42-cd14fda42f9b",
4  "description": "Card Advance",
5  "memo": "card.advance",
6  "amount": 30.00
7}

Example response from the card.advance payment creation. You will need to store the payment ID to complete the payback cycle (see details below).

1{
2  "id": "bf0dd67f-8b3b-464a-b0d4-eb0279b5b0f0",
3  "amount": 30.00,
4  "originating_account_id": "d2c5994c-f872-40da-a14d-369a834f4506",
5  "receiving_account_id": "315f1145-aee1-4978-ab42-cd14fda42f9b",
6  "status": "pending",
7  "description": "Card Advance"
8}

_for more details on creating Book Transfers, see the transfer API request

3. Recapture Advance

Partners that want to recapture the funds that were distributed to their consumers need to have access to two properties.

  1. Id of the partner FBO account
  2. Id of the consumer bank account
  3. Id of the original payment from when the advance was initiated

On payback, partners need to set the memo field to card.advance.payback and include the id of the initial payment in the reference_payment_id field of the API request.

Payback use the same request as Advances but the originating_account_id and receiving_account_id are reversed.

Example POST message to /v2/payments/transfer to pay back a Card Advance.

1{
2  "originating_account_id": "315f1145-aee1-4978-ab42-cd14fda42f9b",
3  "receiving_account_id": "d2c5994c-f872-40da-a14d-369a834f4506",
4  "reference_payment_id": "bf0dd67f-8b3b-464a-b0d4-eb0279b5b0f0",
5  "description": "Card Advance Payback",
6  "memo": "card.advance.payback",
7  "amount": 30.00
8}