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-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/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: kin@apievangelist.com