Vanity Account Numbers

Enable Vanity Account Numbers

To enable Vanity Accounts for your account, contact our

support

, with the desired merchant

handle

By default, any Customer Identifier created by you will have a randomly generated numeric bank account number.

However, Razorpay Smart Collect also allows you to create custom bank accounts with vanity account numbers. This means you will be able to create Customer Identifiers that have the account number RZRPXXXXYYYYYYYYY, where the contents of the XY-segment is entirely within your control.

Alphanumeric Account Numbers

By default, the account numbers generated are always numeric. To use Vanity Accounts, you must set the receivers.bank_account.numeric option to 0, and set the receivers.bank_account.descriptor option to the desired custom value.

If receivers.bank_account.descriptor is set without setting receivers.bank_account.numeric to 0, the request will result in an error: "Descriptor cannot be used for numeric accounts."

The possible options that can be set for the bank_account receiver are given below.

Handle

The 5th through the 8th character, X-segment, in the account number (XXXX in the above example) is referred to as the merchant handle and can be set on request. This segment is fixed and will then be used in the generation of all your alphanumeric Customer Identifier.

Avoid Ambiguous Handles

When displaying a Customer Identifier to a customer, the font used may cause the customer to misread the alphanumeric characters (if any) in the account number. The customers may commit typos while entering the beneficiary account during the payment initiation. It is very common to misread the letter 'O' in an account number as the numeral '0'.

Payments made to such mistyped accounts are considered invalid and are refunded to the customer's account within 1 working day. This could cause inconvenience to customers as they have to wait for 24 hours when large amounts should be refunded.

For this reason, we strongly recommend not to use the following characters in your handle, as they may appear ambiguous in certain fonts.

0 or O
1 or I
5 or S
8 or B
2 or Z

Descriptor

The descriptor field defines the last 9 characters of the generated bank account number.

{
  "receiver": {
    "types": [
      "bank_account"
    ],
    "bank_account": {
      "descriptor": "000000001",
      "numeric": 0
    }
  },
  "customer_id": "cust_805c8oBQdBGPwS",
  "description": "Vanity Virtual Account"
}

Here in this example, a descriptor 000000001 is used to generate an account number, while merchant handle ABCD is pre-decided.

Descriptor Usage

The descriptor can have a maximum length of 9 characters. This is because some banks do not allow the addition of beneficiary accounts that have an account number of more than 17 characters.

This descriptor field can only be used if your merchant handle is set. If it is not set, sending any value in the descriptor field will return an error.

{
  "error": {
    "description": "Descriptor field cannot be used as merchant handle is not set for your account.",
    "code": "BAD_REQUEST_ERROR"
  }
}

The descriptor must be unique for each active Customer Identifier. If a descriptor is sent, which is already in use by another active Customer Identifier, the following error is returned.

{
  "error": {
    "description": "An active Customer Identifier with the same descriptor already exists for your account.",
    "code": "BAD_REQUEST_ERROR"
  }
}

Note

If the descriptor field is not sent but numeric is set to 0, the account number will be a randomly generated alphanumeric string that still uses the merchant handle.