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Use the API to take MOTO payments

If you have an integration with the GOV.UK Pay API, you can create MOTO payments through our API. Your paying user gives you their payment details by calling your service or sending their details through the post. An agent enters the paying user’s payment details and completes the payment.

Make sure you’ve turned on MOTO (telephone or post) payments on your account first.

Create a MOTO payment using the GOV.UK Pay API

Warning If your payment service provider is Worldpay, you must use an API key from your MOTO service.

  1. Use the POST /v1/payments endpoint to request a payment and include "moto": true in the request body:

    {
  "amount": 14500,
  "reference" : "12345",
  "description": "Pay your council tax",
  "return_url": "https://your.service.gov.uk/payment_complete_page",
  "moto": true
}

  2. Go to the next_url included in the response to your API request.

  3. On the Enter payment details page, enter your user’s payment details. The Enter payment details page does not have a billing address field, even if you’ve turned on billing address collection on your service.

  4. On the Confirm your payment page, confirm the payment details. You will not need to do a 3D Secure confirmation.

Taking a payment by post

If you’re taking a payment by post, make sure you’ve collected your user’s:

Hide users’ card information

When taking payments over the phone, you can hide the card information of paying users. When a call centre agent enters a user’s card information, the details are hidden like a password. This protects the paying user’s card information from anyone that can see the call centre agent’s screen. You can hide:

  • the card number
  • the card verification value (CVV) or card verification code (CVC)

To hide or unhide this information, you must have the Administrator role for your MOTO service. To see if you are an admin for a service, select Manage team members from the Overview screen.

This change takes immediate effect, so you should tell your service team staff before changing these settings.

  1. Sign in to the GOV.UK Pay admin tool.
  2. Select the account you want to change.
  3. Go to Settings and then Security.
  4. Go to either Hide card numbers or Hide card security codes and select Change.
  5. Select either Hidden or Visible and then Save changes.