Reimbursements, unlike other forms of payment, haven’t changed much over the years. While earning rewards, sending funds and receiving digital receipts are becoming instantaneous and easy - a reimbursement has historically taken much longer. Many businesses and their customers rely on accurate and timely reimbursements, yet current practices are still clunky, time consuming, lack quality data and provide little satisfaction or user engagement.

In fact, 30 days is the typical length of time for a reimbursement to be processed by a business. The inflexibility of payout methods - some insurance providers still opt to use checks - can drag out a simple process to a weeks-long exchange with a customer.

It’s not convenient for businesses either. Over a month, many reimbursement claims can pile up for a finance team to manage, each needing to be verified to ensure they aren’t fraudulent and meet the parameters for payout. Additionally, many businesses are forced to store sensitive customer information to ensure they’re paying the correct account.  

In a world where open finance solutions and real-time payments are becoming the benchmark, we saw an opportunity to provide a better solution.    

Reimagining Reimbursements

Ever since we first went live in 2018, reimbursements have been a pain point we’ve wanted to solve.

Today, we’re thrilled to be able to announce the public launch of our Reimbursements API in the U.S, supported on both Mastercard and Visa cards.

This API closes the loop on a range of our capabilities. Specifically, it enables developers to build programmable reimbursement experiences on top of payment cards, allowing funds to be sent back to a user’s card within 48 to 72 hours.

We offer a single endpoint for developers, so there’s no need for them to integrate to a host of third parties. You’ll have extensive coverage of Visa and Mastercard debit and credit cards, and can save on legal and data privacy costs, as we tokenize all sensitive cardholder information, so there’s no need to store it. We’re removing the unnecessary time, manual labor and complexity of reimbursing customers.

How it works (briefly)

The Reimbursements product operates as an add-on to our Transactions API to easily reimburse users. It allows developers to spot specific purchases and send either full or partial reimbursements directly to a user’s card.

Accounts must be set up in the U.S. and use the latest version of the API to access the Reimbursement product. Once activated, a business can then manage their claims through Fidel's dashboard, using a credit system to fund reimbursements. Your credit balance updates every time you purchase Fidel credits and ‘spend’ them to request a reimbursement.

The dashboard offers complete visibility and control, including a historic archive of claims, credit balance, eligible claim criteria controls, and a holistic dashboard of all live claim statuses, once integrated with our Offers feature.  

We’re looking forward to bringing the Reimbursements API product to new geographies and additional networks in the future. However, for now, we’re delighted to be able to offer this new functionality to U.S. businesses - we can’t wait to see you get started.

Next Steps?

📍 Looking for more information? You can explore our full documentation on the Reimbursements API here.

📍 We also recommend visiting our API Reference page to understand how to use the API within your own application.

📍 If you’re a developer, you can join our Dev Community where we post regular support articles, and you can ask and answer questions from fellow developers.

📍 If you’re a US-based business and would like to get a sense of what you could build with our Reimbursements API, get in touch with our Customer Success team at cs@fidel.uk.

Finally, make sure to subscribe to our blog to never miss a beat - we have a lot of exciting news on the way!