Clairtus for Developers

Escrow & payout infrastructure for African marketplaces.

A single API to hold buyer funds in escrow and release them on delivery — across mobile money and bank rails. Non-custodial: we orchestrate the money, licensed partners hold and settle it.

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create-escrow.sh

curl https://api.clairtus.com/v1/escrows \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ck_live_…" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: $(uuidgen)" \
  -d currency=ZAR \
  -d baseAmount=100000 \
  -d feeBps=150 \
  -d sellerPartyId=pty_…

# → escrow created. Fund it via a pay-in,
# then release to the seller on delivery.

Non-custodialLicensed-partner settlementMobile money + bank railsBuilt for Africa

The trust layer for online commerce in Africa

Everything you need to take payment, hold it safely, and pay it out — without becoming a payments company yourself.

Full escrow lifecycle API

Create, fund, release, refund and dispute escrows through a clean REST API. Single-payment or split payouts to multiple recipients, with configurable platform fees.

Non-custodial by design

We never take possession of your customers' money. Clairtus orchestrates the flow; regulated payment partners hold and settle the funds — so you launch without your own money-services licence.

Multi-rail routing & failover

One integration, many rails. We route collections and payouts across mobile money and bank partners (Korapay, PawaPay and more) with automatic failover and a circuit breaker.

Double-entry ledger & reconciliation

Every movement is recorded in an immutable, balanced ledger and reconciled against partner balances (available + pending) so your books never silently drift.

Compliance & KYC built in

Per-market amount and volume limits, structuring checks, and identity verification (Smile ID) are wired into the escrow flow — not bolted on afterwards.

Webhooks, idempotency & retries

Signed webhooks for every state change, mandatory idempotency keys on money operations, and a durable retry queue with a dead-letter backstop.

How an escrow flows

Create an escrow

Define the buyer, seller(s), amount, currency and fee split. Clairtus returns an escrow you can track through its whole lifecycle.

Collect the funds

The buyer pays in via mobile money or bank transfer through a licensed partner. The funds are held — not by Clairtus, by the partner — until the deal is done.

Release or refund

On delivery confirmation, release to the seller; otherwise refund the buyer. Clairtus routes the payout and posts the settled, net-of-fees amounts to the ledger.

Built for engineers, safe for money

Clean primitives, predictable money semantics, and a sandbox so you can ship escrow into your product in days — not quarters.

Typed SDK with auto-idempotency on money POSTs
Sandbox mode — build and test with zero real money
OpenAPI / Swagger reference for every endpoint
Cursor-paginated list endpoints
Scoped API keys (test + live) per tenant
Per-key rate limiting and a single error envelope

API reference Talk to us

Live in production

Proven on real transactions

Our consumer product in the Democratic Republic of Congo — a WhatsApp-based escrow app on M-Pesa, Orange Money and Airtel Money — runs on this exact engine. The B2B API is the same escrow core, exposed for marketplaces and platforms to build on.

See the consumer product

DRC

Live today

Onboarding

Build escrow into your product

Tell us what you're building and we'll set you up with sandbox keys and a direct line to the team.

Request API access API docs