Most payment integrations start small and end up enormous. The first payout is a weekend project. Then you add a second rail, and a third. A new market arrives with its own file format and its own cut-off times. Then someone asks you to move money on behalf of your own customers, and the integration you wrote for one business has to become an integration for thousands.
The work was never the first payment. It was everything that came after — and the fact that each new thing looked nothing like the last. Magellan is built on the opposite bet: one integration whose shape does not change as you grow. The way you move money on day one is the way you move it at scale.
One way to move money
There is a single way to send a payment. You tell Magellan who receives it, how much, and which rail it should travel on. That is the whole request — not a different recipe for every situation, just the same three answers each time.
You attach your own reference to it, a key you choose, and that key is the safety net. If a response is ever lost to a timeout, asking again with the same key returns the original payment rather than quietly sending a second one. The reply comes back straight away with an identifier and a status you can follow from the moment it is initiated through to settled.
Switch rails without switching integrations
Sending over ACH, sending in real time, sending to a card — these are not three projects. They are the same request naming a different rail. A standard bank transfer over ACH, an instant transfer that lands in seconds at any hour of any day, or a push straight onto a Visa or Mastercard: each is one choice in an otherwise identical call, with the same response and the same set of states behind it.
The same holds the moment you leave the United States. The request that pays a US bank account also reaches the domestic real-time rails the rest of the world has quietly rebuilt — PIX in Brazil, UPI in India, SEPA Instant across the eurozone, SPEI in Mexico, Faster Payments in the UK — each settling in seconds, each in its own local currency. You are not onboarding a new provider per country; you are naming a different destination.
And when the right destination is not a bank or a card at all, the same request settles in stablecoins — dollars held as USDC or USDT — or over Bitcoin's Lightning network, landing in a wallet in seconds at any hour. A contractor who would rather hold digital dollars than wait on a local-currency deposit is one field away, not one integration away.
Across every one of these — domestic and cross-border, fiat and stablecoin — the call does not change shape. Magellan settles in more than thirty currencies across bank, card, and crypto rails, and choosing among them is a value in a field, not a fork in your code. Changing how the money lands is a decision, not a development cycle. If you want the longer story on why instant rails change what finance and payments teams can actually do, we wrote about how real-time rails work.
Events find you
You never sit in a loop asking what happened. You register a single place for us to reach, and Magellan delivers events as the payment moves — submitted, completed, failed, returned. Each one is cryptographically signed, so you can trust it came from us and not someone pretending to be us, and each carries a stable identifier, so a delivery that arrives twice is trivial to recognise. Acknowledge it within a few seconds and you are done.
The same API, from one merchant to thousands
This is the point where most stacks fork into a second, harder integration — the one you build when a single business becomes a platform of many. Magellan does not fork here. The distance between the two is a setting, not a rewrite.
Direct
One business, one identity. You manage your own customers, accounts, and payment flows, and the integration above is the whole integration. Nothing more to wire up.
Platform
Onboard a whole fleet of sub-merchants in a single call and act on behalf of any of them. Each keeps its own signing secret, and every event names the merchant it belongs to — so one endpoint quietly routes for all of them.
A global organization with entities in a dozen countries is not a dozen integrations. It is the same way of moving money, scoped to whichever entity is paying. The surface you learned on the first afternoon is the surface you operate at the largest scale.
Simple is the feature
Real-time rails, multi-currency, cards, crypto, compliance, treasury — the complexity is real, and it is ours to carry. What reaches your team is one way to move money, one choice of rail, one token to get in, and events that come to you. That restraint is deliberate. The integration you write once is the one you keep.
Read the full reference in the API documentation, or talk to us about your integration.