Original publication date: April 22, 2020
Question:
What happens when we send a wire payment and it gets returned? How will we recognize the return? Will we receive the return as a new inbound wire payment?
Answer:
A wire return varies depending on the returning bank's processes and systems.
In all cases wire returns show as a new payment. COS tries to link the incoming wire with the previous payment if details of the previous payment are included. This isn’t mandatory, but sometimes our Operations team can manually link payments/wire messages to a previous payment.
To identify a wire return, look at the OriginalPaymentId on the payment object. If Payment.Id != Payment.OriginalPaymentId, then it is linked to the original payment.
This system isn’t 100% effective, because previous payment information isn’t required, and the bank returning the wire may initiate a new wire to return the money.
In any case, when a new incoming wire or a return comes in you will receive a Wire.Payment.Received event.
We understand that this isn’t as clean as ACH, but this is due to the lack of hard rules in the underlying FedWire system.