How are refunds initiated in Swadesipay

The customer requests a refund from the merchant due to reasons such as the non-delivery of goods or poor service quality. Merchants can initiate refunds against transactions with Swadesipay either via the website or via APIs. All refunds are made to the original method of payment unless agreed explicitly by the end customer to credit to an alternate mode. Credits towards reversed transactions (where funds are received by Swadesipay) and refund transactions shall be routed back through Swadesipay’s escrow account unless as per contract the refund.

What is the Payment Gateway refund process

Once the merchant makes a refund request, Cashree Payments will check if the request is eligible, accept the request and then propagate this information to the respective acquiring banks and other banking institutions via APIs. A refund request typically involves an exchange of information between 3 to 4 parties. Each of them has its own processes to file the request, map to their respective payment IDs and then process it forward. Many of these processes are not fully automated today and thus take around 5 - 10 working days to reach the customer’s account/ card balance. Swadesipay or any other payment aggregator acts only as a mediator between the customer and the banks.

Refund processing timelines

All refund requests, once eligible and accepted are initiated with the banking partners immediately. The refund request is sent via APIs or other channels based on the support provided by the acquiring banks.

Standard processing time (5 to 7 days):

Once the refund is initiated with the bank, it generally takes about 5 to 7 working days to get reflected on the customer's account/ card statement. This is due to the processes in the banking ecosystem which are not fully automated and require some manual oversight. Given the number of entities involved and the variance in their processes to handle refunds, it takes 5 to 7 business days to credit the money to the customer's account.

Extended processing time (beyond 7 days):

Sometimes a refund request gets dropped at different points in the process due to system failures and hence won’t go through the API route or the online refund status can’t be updated. In such scenarios, Swadesipay intervenes with manual oversight to escalate cases with the bank and get them resolved. Since there is a manual oversight required at various parties the turnaround times get further extended. The standard turnaround time is 5 - 7 business days. However, each payment mode has a slightly different time frame for refunds.