What are Dedicated Virtual Accounts?

A dedicated virtual account is a feature on the Paystack Dashboard and API that allows merchants to create and reserve bank account numbers for receiving payments from their customers.  This enables your customers to pay you via bank transfers to this dedicated virtual account.

How does this work?

The dedicated virtual account that you generate for your customers is linked to your Paystack business. When your customers send money to a dedicated virtual account, a transaction will be created on your transaction page just like any other transaction done via card, bank, USSD, etc. Also, as with any other transaction, you will be notified via email and this transaction will be captured on your Paystack dashboard. If you've set up any webhooks, events will be fired to that webhook URL so your servers can take action following the payment.

You can look at a dedicated virtual account as another payment channel for your business. Now, customers will be able to pay you with a simple bank transfer to the account number assigned to them.

All businesses have a limit of 1000 virtual accounts which can be assigned to a customer. To request an increase in this limit, please send an email to support@paystack.com.

What are the requirements for creating Dedicated Virtual Accounts?

• The customer's phone number
• The customer's full name
• The customer's email address

In addition to the above requirements, merchants who fall under the categories of Financial services, Betting, and General Services will need to validate their customers. For more on customer validation, please visit our API documentation here.

How can I generate a dedicated virtual account for my customer?

Dedicated virtual accounts can be created from the Paystack dashboard or via API. For merchants who fall under the categories of Financial services, Betting, and General Services, Dedicated virtual accounts can only be created via the API as customer validation, which is a requirement, can only be done via the API.

Please follow the steps below to get started.

Via the Dashboard

1. Navigate to the Customers page on your dashboard and select the customer you would like to create a dedicated virtual account for.

2. When on a particular customer, you will see the 'Account' menu to generate an account number for the customer. Click on this.

1. You will see the 'Create Account' button, click on this.  

2. Finally, click on the 'Complete' button.

3. The account number will be successfully created for the customer. 

Via the API

To generate a dedicated virtual account via the API, please visit our documentation here.

Supported Banks

How are the generated Virtual Accounts named?

By default, when the customer attempts to make a transfer to the created account number, the account name will be in this format:

However, for businesses that want to provide the virtual account service to other businesses (B2B2Cs), we have a naming feature that allows you to pass the name of the business you're providing the service to into the account name.

For example, if your Paystack business is an online school management portal that wants to assign the virtual accounts to schools who can then assign to their customers, you can assign the account name in the format (School Name/Customer_Name) rather than (Paystack Business name/Customer Name).

If your business is interested in this naming type, please send an email to support@paystack.com so we can review and extend the feature to your business.

Pricing

Dedicated virtual accounts will be priced at 1% capped at N300 per transaction.