Payments API
Card acceptance across Visa, Mastercard, Amex and the major wallets, with 3-D Secure 2.2 exemption handling and network tokens issued at first authorisation.
Acquiring · Payouts · Terminals · Risk
Payments infrastructure for companies that read the logs
Northgate is a licensed acquirer and payments platform. One API for card acceptance, one for payouts, and a settlement file you can reconcile without a support ticket. Built in Leeds, operating across 38 settlement currencies.
- 0ms
- Median authorisation latency
- 0
- Settlement currencies
- 0%
- First-attempt approval rate
Halden GrocersFerrolane LogisticsAster & ValeNorthbank RailKestrel Fitness GroupCopperline CoffeeStudio VoxelWrenfield PharmacyMarlow Interiors
Platform
Six surfaces, one ledger
Everything below writes to the same ledger and appears in the same settlement file. Adding a product does not add a reconciliation problem.
Payouts
Faster Payments and SEPA Instant disbursements from a funded balance, with idempotent submission and a webhook on every state change.
Terminals
Countertop and portable readers on the same account as your online volume, provisioned over the air and reconciled into one settlement file.
Risk and fraud
Rules and a scoring model trained on your own approval history, with every decision returned in the authorisation response rather than in a nightly report.
Platforms
Sub-merchant onboarding, split settlement and per-seller payout schedules for marketplaces operating under your own licence or ours.
Reconciliation
A settlement file keyed on your own reference, with interchange, scheme fees and our margin itemised per transaction rather than pooled.
Authorisation path
Where the 214 milliseconds go
The whole round trip, drawn end to end. Every hop below is measured and published; the figures are medians from the last complete week.
- 010ms
Your checkout
Hosted fields collect the credential in an iframe we serve and return a token.
- 02+9ms
Northgate edge
London or Frankfurt, whichever answers first. Request signed and idempotency checked.
- 03+11ms
Risk engine
Rules and model scored together, with the exemption decision made here.
- 04+168ms
Card scheme
Direct connection to Visa or Mastercard, no intermediate gateway.
- 05+26ms
Issuer
Authorisation returned with the scheme reason code preserved verbatim.
- Median round trip
- 214ms
The API
One endpoint, one response, no surprises
A payment is a single POST. The response carries the fee breakdown, the risk decision and the settlement batch, so nothing has to be looked up afterwards.
POST /v1/payments
Request
curl https://api.northgatepay.example/v1/payments \
-H "Authorization: Bearer ngp_live_9f2c..." \
-H "Idempotency-Key: ord_88213-a" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"amount": 4250,
"currency": "GBP",
"token": "tok_2Rf8Xq4mVn",
"reference": "ORD-88213",
"capture": true
}'Response
HTTP/1.1 201 Created
x-northgate-request-id: req_7Kd0Wm
{
"id": "pay_3QhLm2Vx",
"status": "captured",
"amount": 4250,
"currency": "GBP",
"reference": "ORD-88213",
"network": "visa",
"scheme_response": "00",
"risk": { "score": 7, "decision": "accept" },
"exemption": "transaction_risk_analysis",
"settlement": { "batch": "stl_2026_02_11", "date": "2026-02-12" },
"fees": { "total": 80, "interchange": 43, "scheme": 7, "northgate": 30 },
"latency_ms": 198
}In person
The NG-410, and the volume behind it
A portable reader with fourteen hours of battery, 4G and Wi-Fi, and semi-integrated mode so your till never enters PCI scope. It authorises against the same API as your website and lands in the same settlement file.
- Devices supported
- NG-210, NG-410, NG-620
- Connectivity
- Wi-Fi, 4G, Bluetooth
- In-person rate
- 1.2% + 8p
- Battery, portable
- 14 hours
Illustrative device artwork. No card details are collected on this page.
Why Northgate
What an engineering team notices in the first fortnight
Four things we hold ourselves to, published rather than promised, and measured on the status page.
99.995% authorisation uptime
Measured across the last twelve rolling months on the authorisation path, excluding nothing. The figure and the incident history are on the status page.
214ms median, 480ms at p99
Round trip from request received to response written, measured at our edge in London and Frankfurt, published weekly rather than quoted from a good day.
PCI DSS 4.0 Level 1 and PSD2 SCA
Assessed annually by a QSA. Hosted fields keep card data out of your systems entirely, so your scope is a SAQ A rather than an audit.
Settlement in 38 currencies
Settle in the currency you sell in or convert at a published mid-market rate plus 35 basis points. No spread hidden inside the settlement figure.
The company
Started by the engineer who kept getting paged at 03:00
Northgate was founded in 2016 by Marek Bielawski, who had spent six years on the payments team at a UK marketplace and had run out of patience with gateways that returned a generic decline and no reason code. The first version of the platform was a reconciliation tool he wrote so his own finance team would stop emailing him about missing settlements.
The company now holds an FCA authorisation as a payment institution, connects directly to Visa and Mastercard, and processes for roughly 4,100 merchants across the UK and the EEA. Ninety-one people, of whom fifty-two are engineers, and an on-call rota that still includes the founder.
Marek Bielawski, founder and principal engineer
- Every decline returns a scheme reason code and a plain-English cause
- Direct scheme connections, so there is no gateway between you and the network
- Settlement files published at 07:00 local, on the same schema since 2018
- Status page and incident history public since the first outage in 2017
Common questions
What teams ask before they integrate
Card volume settles on T+1 by default, cut off at 22:00 UK time, with funds in the nominated account by 07:00 the following working day. T+0 settlement is available on the Scale tier for merchants trading above one million pounds a month. Payouts over Faster Payments clear in seconds and SEPA Instant within ten seconds.
No minimum term on Standard or Scale, and thirty days notice either way. Interchange Plus is a twelve-month agreement because it is priced against your own volume mix. We do not use early termination fees.
Yes. We run a PCI-compliant bulk import with your current provider, and your stored credentials arrive as network tokens on our side. A migration of two million credentials typically takes nine working days end to end, most of which is waiting on the incumbent.
The status page updates within four minutes of detection, with an owner named. Authorisation traffic fails over between our London and Frankfurt regions automatically. A written post-incident review is published within five working days, including the timeline and the remediation.
Yes. You can onboard sub-merchants under our licence with KYB handled by our onboarding API, or operate under your own permission and use us purely for acquiring. Split settlement is computed at authorisation, so the seller ledger is correct before the money moves.
Every account has a named implementation engineer for the first ninety days. After that, technical support is answered by engineers on rota, with a fifteen-minute response target on production-impacting issues for Scale and Interchange Plus.
Next step
Read the reference, then send one request
A sandbox key is issued in the console without a sales conversation, and it returns the same error codes production does. When you are ready to talk commercials, an engineer takes the call.