Glossary

The money

Balance. The funded USD you hold with us, topped up by wire or with USDC (in the sandbox you set it yourself). Every payout is debited from it, which is why an underfunded balance fails at pricing rather than at delivery. It is denominated in USD and can be held as US dollars or as USD stablecoins (USDC, USDT), which count as USD. POST /payouts takes no sourceCurrency; only the two-step quote (POST …/quotes/offramp) can name the balance currency to debit.

Balance transaction. One row in your balance history (GET /balance_transactions) for each change to what you can spend. The types are funding, hold, hold_release, payout, payout_return and adjustment. Money back from a payout the receiving bank returned is a payout_return row. Canceling a payout still waiting on your wallet funding writes no row, because it was never debited.

Corridor. A currency you can pay into, plus the fields that currency requires. USD → MXN is a corridor. Your corridors depend on how your organization is routed, and routing can change, so read the list from the API rather than hardcoding it.

Rate. How many units of the destination currency one unit of the source currency buys. On an indicative quote it is the rate before the fee, and the fee comes out of the amount you send. On a payout it is the effective rate, with the fee inside both amounts, so the same conversion shows a slightly lower rate.

Routing. The payment network or networks your organization’s payouts go through. It decides which corridors you have and which fields each needs.

Indicative quote. A price with no commitment and no recipient, shown while someone is still typing an amount.

Binding quote. A price locked against a real recipient. Money can move against it, and it expires.

The people

Recipient. The person or company receiving the money, with the bank details needed to reach them. You register them once and pay them many times. API paths say recipient (/recipients). Some operation ids and SDK methods keep an older name, createBeneficiary for example; they mean the same thing.

Destination account. One bank account (payment method) on a recipient, identified by destinationAccountId. It is the id you pay.

End user. Your customer, on whose behalf you are sending. They never sign up with Avvio. Attributing a recipient to an end user stops one of your users seeing another’s saved bank accounts.

Sender of record. You. The money leaves your balance, and the recipient is your counterparty, not ours.

External id. Your own identifier for a recipient. Sending the same one twice returns the recipient you already created instead of registering a second bank account. One external id always means one account.

The bank details

CLABE. Mexico’s 18-digit standardized bank account number. Its check digit catches a typo before anything is sent.

IBAN. The international account number format used across Europe and beyond.

IFSC. The code identifying an Indian bank branch, required with the account number. The routing can also ask for details about the account holder, so the corridors call decides what you collect.

SWIFT / BIC. The code identifying a bank internationally, used on correspondent-banking rails rather than local ones.

The mechanics

Idempotency key. A value you generate and attach to anything that moves money. Send the same one again and you get the original result, not a second payment. It makes retrying a timed-out request safe, and is independent of how you authenticate.

API key. The credential itself, avvio_live_… or avvio_test_…. Whoever holds it can spend. It is shown once and we store only its hash.

Webhook. A message we push when a payout changes state. A signal to go and look, never the source of truth.

Event feed. A numbered, replayable list of everything that happened to your organization. You reconcile against it when a webhook was missed or your system was down.

The environments

Sandbox. The same API, validation and errors, with no payment network. Your key decides it: a test key cannot move real money.

Trigger. A deliberate sandbox outcome, chosen by the last four digits of a recipient’s account number. 0003 completes and then fails, the case most ledgers get wrong.

Going live. Swapping a test key for a live one once your business is verified and your balance funded. The base URL, paths and payloads do not change.