A Unified API for All Your Payments

At Rail, we’ve always believed that moving money should feel as seamless as moving data. However until now, that wasn’t the reality. Sending payments across borders or currencies has always meant hacking together multiple operations; deposits, exchanges, withdrawals, payment accounts, and more. Ultimately, creating a Frankenstein’s monster of an end-to-end payment flow. 

Our new Payments API changes that. It’s a single, unified interface for initiating payments from any account or crypto wallet in the world to any other account or wallet — no matter the rail, currency, or location. From a US bank account to a Solana wallet. From a GBP virtual account to a partner business in Brazil. It all runs through one endpoint.

The Payments API is a foundational shift in how payments are initiated and managed on Rail. This is just the beginning of a much broader roadmap that I can’t wait to share with you all.

The Past

Rail has been processing payments for a while now. Previously, clients stitched their operations together essentially using building blocks to map to their use case. Deposits, exchanges, withdrawals, and payment accounts carefully orchestrated to string everything together and manage each individual operation. It worked, yes, but every payment became a flowchart. With payment operations and compliance complexity increasing exponentially with the complexity of the payment chain.

The Present

Rail’s new payments API abstracts those operations away. You specify a source and a destination, and Rail handles the rest — from counterparty screening to transaction monitoring to the actual payment processing. Each payment is represented as a single object with a unified lifecycle, status, and event history. That means cleaner integrations, less back-office overhead, and fewer places for things to break.

The Future

Collections are just the beginning. In the coming months, the Payments API will expand to support:

• Outbound payouts
• Payments with automatic currency conversion
• Scheduled and future-dated payments
• Bulk and batch operations

Each of these features will extend the same design philosophy: simplify the developer experience, reduce operational overhead, and ensure compliance and transparency at every step.

Benefits of the New Payments API

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Why It Matters

• Faster Integrations. Integrate once. Move money globally. The Payments API eliminates the need to build against multiple endpoints for different use cases or currencies.
• Use Case Flexibility. Support any currency, payment rail, or jurisdiction with one consistent integration. Let Rail handle the complexity behind the scenes so you can focus on building your own use case and customer experience.
• Simplified Payment Operations. Every payment has a single source of truth. Real-time status updates, RFI management, and lifecycle events are all consolidated in one object. Your support and operations teams will thank you.
• Compliance Built In. Customer onboarding, counterparty screening, transaction monitoring, and RFI handling are managed end-to-end within the API. No extra tools required.‍

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Get Started

Explore Rail's Payments API documentation and Payments - Collections Build Guide to build your own payments gateway.

And stay tuned for more — this is just the first step toward a more powerful, developer-first global payments platform.

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