Dedicated virtual accounts

A dedicated virtual account is a Paystack feature that allows businesses to create and reserve bank account numbers to receive customer payments. This means your customers can pay via bank transfers to this dedicated virtual account anytime.

This feature is currently only available to Nigeria-based registered businesses.

Any dedicated virtual account generated for your customers will be 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, or other payment channels.

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.

A dedicated virtual account is simply an additional payment channel for your business. 

All businesses have a limit of 1,000 virtual accounts to be assigned to customers. To request an increase in this limit, please reach out to us via email at support@paystack.com or via our contact form.

The charge per transaction is 1%, capped at NGN 300.

There are three main requirements for creating a DVA for a customer:

• The customer's phone number

• The customer's full name

• The customer's email address

In addition to the above requirements, businesses that fall under the business 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.

Dedicated virtual accounts can be created from the Paystack dashboard or via API. For businesses that fall under the financial services, betting, and general services categories, dedicated virtual accounts can only be created via the API as customer validation, which is a requirement, can only be done via the API.

Kindly follow these steps to generate a dedicated virtual account via the Dashboard:

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

2. Click on the customer to reveal their customer profile. When the page opens up, you will see the 'Dedicated Virtual Account' tab to generate an account number for the customer. 

3. Click on 'Create Account.' If this hasn't been provided, fill in the customer's name and phone number and click on 'Continue.'

4. You'll receive a prompt to choose a preferred bank for the customer. You can choose between Wema Bank and Paystack-Titan. Once you choose a bank, click 'Complete', and an account number will be successfully created for the customer. 

Please visit our documentation here to generate a dedicated virtual account via the API.

We currently support Paystack-Titan and Wema Bank. You can get available banks using the Fetch ProvidersAPI endpoint.

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

Paystack-Titan: Paystack Business Name/ Customer Name.
Wema Bank: Paystack Business Name / Customer Name.

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 virtual accounts to schools that 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 convention, please reach out to us via email at support@paystack.com or via our contact form.

Important to note

A NUBAN is a 10-digit bank account number and is the acronym for Nigeria Uniform Bank Account Number. It is a uniform bank account numbering system that was established in 2011 by the Central Bank of Nigeria. 

All banks in Nigeria follow this numbering system, and each of their customers has a unique NUBAN.