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Collect payments with Airtel Money

AIRTEL_MONEY collects through the Airtel Africa open API. Centipid Billing pushes a payment request to the payer’s Airtel wallet, the payer authorizes it on their handset, and the transaction status is read back from Airtel.
Airtel Money is not offered by the country catalog. Every country list in the application offers some other set of gateways, and none of them includes Airtel Money — so it does not appear in the Settings → Payments marketplace and cannot be selected there, even though the credential form and the integration both exist and work.In practice this means the gateway is reachable only for an account already configured on it. Do not plan a migration onto Airtel Money without first confirming with support that it can be enabled for your country.

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Before you start

  1. Confirm with support that Airtel Money is available for your account, given the limitation above.
  2. Complete Airtel Africa developer onboarding in an account owned by the ISP, and collect the client ID and client secret.
  3. Confirm which country and currency Airtel has approved for your merchant account — they decide the overrides below.

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Configure the gateway

1

Open Settings → Payments → Airtel Money

Available only where the gateway is already enabled for the account.
2

Enter the API credentials

Airtel client ID and Airtel client secret are both required. The secret is stored as a secret and is not echoed back after saving.
3

Leave the overrides blank unless Airtel told you otherwise

Country code override and currency code override are optional. Left blank, requests use your account’s own country and currency, falling back to UG and UGX. Set them only when Airtel has approved a different explicit value for your merchant account.
4

Run a controlled test payment

Pay a small amount and confirm the wallet prompt arrives and the payment reaches the ledger.

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Credentials

Country and currency are sent as X-Country and X-Currency headers on every request, so a wrong override is rejected by Airtel rather than silently converted.

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Callback URLs

None are shown in Settings → Payments. Completion is established by reading the transaction status back from Airtel rather than by waiting for a callback.

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What the payer must provide

An Airtel mobile money number, which is normalized for the resolved country before the request is sent. Authorization happens on the handset, so no Airtel domain needs to be added to the captive walled garden.

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How a payment completes

1

Request

Centipid Billing authenticates against the Airtel API and posts the payment request with the resolved country and currency.
2

Authorization

The payer approves the request on their handset.
3

Confirmation

The transaction status is queried back from Airtel. A completed transaction is recorded as a payment and the subscriber’s package applied; a failed one is marked failed with the status Airtel returned.

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Troubleshooting

For every gateway’s fields in one place, see the credential reference.