Connecting a rail
POST /v1/events from your own services.A rail is a network money moves on: mobile money, cards, bank transfers, instant payments or stablecoins. A connector is a ready-made link that pulls or receives events from a rail and turns them into Sentinel events.
Connectors are an alternative to calling the API yourself. Many teams use both: the API for their own payment service, and connectors for rails where the operator or processor already has an API.
What connectors do
- Pull or receive transactions from an operator, processor or bank switch, using credentials you hold.
- Normalise them into Sentinel events, with the same fields and idempotency rules as events you send through the API.
- Report their health on the Connectors screen.
Connectors run inside your install. Their traffic goes from your network to the rail's API over HTTPS. Nothing passes through Somu Labs.
Before you start
- An admin role in the console.
- API credentials from the operator, processor or switch, issued to your company.
- An outbound HTTPS route from your install to the rail's API.
Setup
The Connect a rail screen walks through four steps.
Choose
Pick the rail and provider from the list of available connectors.
Credentials
Enter the credentials the provider issued you. They're stored in your install and never leave it.
Test
Sentinel makes a test call to the provider and shows a sample of the events it would create. Check that amounts, currencies and account IDs look right.
Go live, in shadow mode first
The connector starts sending events. In shadow mode, those events are scored and can raise alerts, but the decisions don't feed back into payments. Watch the alert volumes for a few days, then switch it to live.
Matching IDs
Rules work per source, so the IDs a connector produces need to match the entities you've sent. If your customers' wallets are identified by phone number at the operator, use the same identifier as the account_id when you create the wallet entity.