Wave Mobile Money

aid: wave-mobile-money
name: Wave Mobile Money
description: >-
  Wave is a Dakar, Senegal-headquartered mobile money company on a mission to
  "make Africa the first cashless continent." Founded by Drew Durbin and
  Lincoln Quirk (who previously built the Sendwave remittance service) and
  publicly launched in Senegal in 2018, Wave provides a smartphone- and
  agent-based wallet that lets users deposit and withdraw cash for free and
  send money domestically for a flat 1% fee — roughly 70% cheaper than the
  telco-led mobile money incumbents in the region. Wave operates today in
  Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Uganda, Mali, Burkina Faso, and The Gambia, working
  through a dense network of human agents alongside the Wave app and a
  separate Wave Business portal for merchants and enterprises. In September
  2021, Wave raised a USD 200M Series A led by Sequoia Heritage, Founders
  Fund, Stripe, and Ribbit at a USD 1.7B valuation — the largest Series A
  ever raised on the African continent at the time. For developers, Wave
  exposes a tier-1 B2B platform via api.wave.com, documented at
  docs.wave.com, with Checkout (hosted payment sessions), Payout (single and
  batch disbursements, reversals, recipient verification), Balance &
  Reconciliation (wallet balance, transactions, refunds), Aggregated
  Merchants (sub-merchant management for aggregators and PSPs), and Webhooks
  with HMAC-SHA256 signing for asynchronous event delivery. API keys are
  scoped per-API, support IP allowlisting and optional request signing, and
  the platform enforces idempotency on POST mutations.
type: Index
position: Provider
access: 3rd-Party
image: https://kinlane-productions.s3.amazonaws.com/apis-json/apis-json-logo.jpg
tags:
  - Mobile Money
  - Payments
  - Fintech
  - Financial Inclusion
  - Africa
  - West Africa
  - Senegal
  - Cote d'Ivoire
  - Uganda
  - Mali
  - Burkina Faso
  - Wallets
  - Disbursements
  - Checkout
  - Payouts
  - Money Transfer
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/wave-mobile-money/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
created: '2026-05-24'
modified: '2026-05-24'
specificationVersion: '0.20'
apis:
  - aid: wave-mobile-money:wave-checkout-api
    name: Wave Checkout API
    description: >-
      Hosted payment session API for accepting one-off payments from Wave
      wallet users. Create a checkout session, redirect the customer to the
      returned wave_launch_url, then receive a checkout.session.completed
      webhook (or poll the session) once payment succeeds. Sessions support
      success_url / error_url redirects, client_reference for correlation,
      restrict_payer_mobile for phone-locked payments, and aggregated_merchant_id
      for PSPs operating on behalf of sub-merchants. Includes session
      retrieval, search by transaction_id or client_reference, refund, and
      explicit expire endpoints.
    humanURL: https://docs.wave.com/checkout
    baseURL: https://api.wave.com
    tags:
      - Checkout
      - Payments
      - Hosted Payment Page
    properties:
      - type: Documentation
        url: https://docs.wave.com/checkout
      - type: Documentation
        url: https://docs.wave.com/business
  - aid: wave-mobile-money:wave-payout-api
    name: Wave Payout API
    description: >-
      Programmatic disbursement API for sending money from a business wallet
      to individual Wave wallets, identified by E.164 mobile number. Supports
      single payouts, payout batches (submit many at once and poll batch
      status), payout reversal, payout lookup by id or client reference, and
      a verify_recipient pre-flight check. All POST requests require an
      Idempotency-Key header for safe retries. Used for bulk payroll, gig
      economy payouts, marketplace seller settlement, humanitarian cash
      transfer programs, and refunds out-of-band of the original payment.
    humanURL: https://docs.wave.com/payout
    baseURL: https://api.wave.com
    tags:
      - Payouts
      - Disbursements
      - Bulk Payments
    properties:
      - type: Documentation
        url: https://docs.wave.com/payout
      - type: Documentation
        url: https://docs.wave.com/business
  - aid: wave-mobile-money:wave-balance-reconciliation-api
    name: Wave Balance & Reconciliation API
    description: >-
      Read-side API for inspecting a business wallet's current balance and
      enumerating its transactions for accounting and reconciliation. GET
      /v1/balance returns the live wallet balance (optionally aggregated
      across subaccounts); GET /v1/transactions returns a paginated,
      time-ordered list of transactions for a given day; POST
      /v1/transactions/:id/refund reverses a received payment including any
      fees. Forward cursor pagination via first / after with a 1000-entry
      page threshold.
    humanURL: https://docs.wave.com/balance-api
    baseURL: https://api.wave.com
    tags:
      - Balance
      - Transactions
      - Reconciliation
      - Refunds
    properties:
      - type: Documentation
        url: https://docs.wave.com/balance-api
      - type: Documentation
        url: https://docs.wave.com/business
  - aid: wave-mobile-money:wave-aggregated-merchants-api
    name: Wave Aggregated Merchants API
    description: >-
      Sub-merchant management API for aggregators, payment service providers,
      and platforms that accept Wave payments on behalf of many downstream
      businesses. Full CRUD over aggregated merchant records — list, create,
      retrieve, update, delete — with the resulting aggregated_merchant_id
      attached to Checkout and Payout calls so that funds and reporting flow
      to the correct underlying merchant.
    humanURL: https://docs.wave.com/aggregated-merchants
    baseURL: https://api.wave.com
    tags:
      - Aggregators
      - PSP
      - Sub-Merchants
      - Marketplace
    properties:
      - type: Documentation
        url: https://docs.wave.com/aggregated-merchants
      - type: Documentation
        url: https://docs.wave.com/business
  - aid: wave-mobile-money:wave-webhooks
    name: Wave Webhooks
    description: >-
      Outbound event delivery channel for asynchronously notifying merchant
      systems when state changes on the Wave platform. Events include
      checkout.session.completed, checkout.session.payment_failed,
      b2b.payment_received, b2b.payment_failed, merchant.payment_received,
      and test.test_event for portal-triggered smoke tests. Every delivery
      carries a Wave-Signature header containing a Unix timestamp and one or
      more HMAC-SHA256 signatures over the raw body; receivers must validate
      the signature and reject deliveries older than five minutes to prevent
      replay. Event payloads use a Stripe-style envelope (id, type, data) and
      the id field should be used to enforce at-least-once-delivery
      idempotency.
    humanURL: https://docs.wave.com/webhook
    baseURL: https://api.wave.com
    tags:
      - Webhooks
      - Events
      - HMAC
      - Asynchronous
    properties:
      - type: Documentation
        url: https://docs.wave.com/webhook
      - type: Documentation
        url: https://docs.wave.com/business
common:
  - type: Website
    url: https://www.wave.com
  - type: Portal
    url: https://www.wave.com/en/
  - type: Portal
    url: https://business.wave.com/
    name: Wave for Business
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://docs.wave.com/business
    name: Wave Business API Reference
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://docs.wave.com/checkout
    name: Wave Checkout API
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://docs.wave.com/payout
    name: Wave Payout API
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://docs.wave.com/balance-api
    name: Wave Balance and Reconciliation API
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://docs.wave.com/aggregated-merchants
    name: Wave Aggregated Merchants API
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://docs.wave.com/webhook
    name: Wave Webhooks
  - type: About
    url: https://www.wave.com/en/about/
  - type: Careers
    url: https://www.wave.com/en/careers/
  - type: Blog
    url: https://www.wave.com/en/blog/
  - type: Blog
    url: https://wave.engineering/
    name: Wave Engineering Blog
  - type: TermsOfService
    url: https://www.wave.com/en/terms_and_conditions/
  - type: PrivacyPolicy
    url: https://www.wave.com/en/privacy/
  - type: Security
    url: https://www.wave.com/en/security/responsible_disclosure
    name: Responsible Disclosure
  - type: Support
    url: https://www.wave.com/en/complaints-policy/
    name: Complaints Policy
  - type: Product
    url: https://www.wave.com/en/wdf/
    name: Wave Digital Finance
  - type: Pricing
    url: https://www.wave.com/en/
    name: 1% Send Fee, Free Deposit/Withdrawal
  - type: Authentication
    url: https://docs.wave.com/business
    name: Bearer API Key with Optional HMAC-SHA256 Request Signing
  - type: RateLimits
    url: https://docs.wave.com/business
    name: HTTP 429 Returned on Excess Requests
  - type: CrunchBase
    url: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/wave-mobile-money
  - type: YCombinator
    url: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/wave
  - type: Wikipedia
    url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_Mobile_Money
  - type: LinkedIn
    url: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wavemobilemoney/
  - type: Twitter
    url: https://x.com/WaveSenegal
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    email: [email protected]