Acquiring Overview

Highnote gives you full control over accepting and disbursing payments, regardless of payment method. Whether you want to accept one-time payments online, set up recurring payments, or process digital wallet payments, the Highnote API enables seamless and dependable payment processing directly from your website or mobile application.

To accept online payments, you must create a payment form for your website or application that lets customers input their sensitive data securely.

To maintain PCI SAQ-A compliance, we recommend building your payment form with the Highnote Secure Inputs SDK, which uses client tokens for its GraphQL API requests.

To maintain PCI SAQ-A compliance, you must tokenize customer data.

Tokenizing customer data ensures that PCI data does not cross your server. Highnote's Secure Inputs SDK handles the input of customer PCI payment card data and submits it to Highnote’s API directly. This workflow keeps you PCI SAQ-A compliant.

The following graphic outlines the acquiring sequence flow with tokenization:

Merchants that are PCI SAQ-D compliant and securely store PCI data already, can choose to bypass tokenization by directly charging payment card data.

The following graphic outlines the acquiring sequence flow without tokenization:

Highnote acquiring APIs use the following foundational objects to manage your payments:

Highnote's Acquiring product follows a payment transaction lifecycle that provides information about each step. For each step in the payment transaction lifecycle, there are corresponding financial transaction events that take place.

The following graphic outlines the payment transaction states in Highnote's acquiring flow:

A typical card payment transaction has the following steps. Financial transaction events associated with each step are done synchronously in the Highnote platform:

To keep Highnote's Acquiring API response time low, we return Summary objects from our mutations. These summary objects contain simplified data about your request. Refer to the Card transaction lifecycle.

To get a full version of a summary object, you can query for the CardAuthorizationStepSummary and then query for the CardAuthorizationStep.

Use the following query to return a CardAuthorizationStepSummary:

Use the following query to return a CardCaptureStepSummary:

The Highnote GraphQL API supports idempotency to ensure platform reliability and consistency. Idempotency acts as a guardian, ensuring that API requests with identical parameters don’t trigger the same action twice if a connection error occurs.

Our Highnote API idempotency key lets you reattempt failed API requests, without creating duplicates or provoking conflicts.

Key specs

To enable idempotency, add an idempotency key to all Highnote API mutations with the following specifications:

• V4 UUID format
• 255 character limit

After receiving the request, the Highnote platform stores the provided UUID with your Organization ID and query. With the idempotency key stored, the Highnote API tracks the parameters of incoming requests to determine if a request is new or a retry.

Key expiration

Idempotency keys expire after 24 hours. If needed, the Highnote team can configure alternate expiration timing for your organization. Contact support@highnote.com.

Key example

The following code snippet is an example of a mutation sent to the API with an idempotency key provided as an input variable:

The Highnote Acquiring Amount object is more precise than that of Highnote Issuance. For example, transactions have an interchange fee of 1.5%. Given a transaction of $1.10, the interchange fee is $0.0165.

Copy code snippet

To properly express this particular value, Amount should display with 4 decimal places.

Highnote Acquiring’s Amount object provides a decimalPlaces value that can be used to determine how many significant digits should be displayed.

Amount precision example

In this example, 4 decimal places are configured so the value to display should be 0.0165