We rebuilt how to handle Requests For Information (RFI)
Cross-border payments occasionally stop for a simple reason: something is missing. A beneficiary may need to provide a government-issued ID. A business name may not match the account information on file. A compliance review may require an additional document before a payment can move forward. These requests are a normal part of operating global payments. The problem is what happens next.
When a payment is blocked, teams need to know what is missing, who needs to provide it, and what happens next. Without that visibility, a straightforward compliance request can turn into a chain of emails, support tickets, manual follow-ups, and uncertainty around payment status.
Today, we’re making that process significantly simpler.
borderless now gives Requests for Information (RFIs) a dedicated workflow so you can see exactly what is needed, respond directly from the dashboard, or manage RFIs programmatically through the API.
Know When a Payment Needs Attention
When an RFI is created, borderless notifies the person who initiated the payment by email. If webhooks are enabled, borderless also sends an event to your systems, allowing your own application or operational workflows to react automatically.
The notification tells you what information is required, so your team doesn’t have to investigate why a payment hasn’t completed or wait for a support response to find out what is holding it up.
The goal is simple: When a payment needs attention, you should know immediately and know what to do about it.
See Every Open RFI in One Place
The borderless dashboard will include all RFIs under Needs Attention section on the homepage showing open RFIs across your account.
From there, your team can select an RFI and see:
- Which payment requires attention
- What information or documentation is missing
- What action is required
- Where to submit the requested information
This gives finance and operations teams a much clearer view of payments that cannot move forward. When the Needs Attention section is empty, you have a quick signal that there are no outstanding RFIs requiring action. That turns what used to require checking email, support tickets, and payment records into a simple operational check.
Respond Without Leaving the Payment
RFIs are also visible directly from the payment details page. If you’re already reviewing a payment and see that additional information is required, you can open the RFI from the same workflow and provide the requested information without navigating to a separate part of the platform.
This matters because operational friction compounds. The fewer places your team has to look, the fewer steps there are between identifying a problem and resolving it.
Manage RFIs Programmatically
For platforms processing payments at higher volumes, dashboard workflows are only part of the solution. That’s why borderless now provides API endpoints for retrieving and responding to RFIs programmatically. View our Global Payout API documentation to learn more.
Retrieve RFIs
The endpoint allows you to retrieve a specific RFI or retrieve RFIs associated with your account. This means you can surface outstanding requests wherever your team already works:
- Your own operations dashboard
- Internal payment tooling
- Customer or merchant portals
- Automated workflows
- Monitoring and exception-management systems
Submit an RFI Response
Responses can be submitted to the same RFI resource using POST. The request uses form-data, keyed by item ID, and supports both text values and file uploads.
That means a single response can include different types of information—for example, providing a business name as text while uploading supporting documentation as a file.
For teams building their own operational layer around Borderless, this makes RFIs another part of the payment lifecycle that can be managed directly through your application.
Close the Loop With Webhooks
The real value for high-volume payment operations comes from combining the API with RFI webhooks.
The workflow can look like this:
1. A payment is submitted.
2. Borderless determines that additional information is required.
3. An RFI is created.
4. Your system receives the webhook.
5. Your system retrieves the RFI through the API.
6. The required information is collected through your workflow.
7. Your system submits the response through the API.
Instead of having an operations team continuously monitor stalled payments, your systems can identify and route exceptions as they happen. That’s the difference between simply having an RFI feature and being able to build RFIs into a scalable payment operation.
Why This Matters as Payment Volume Grows
At low payment volumes, manually resolving an occasional compliance request may not seem like a big problem. At hundreds or thousands of payments, it becomes operational overhead. A handful of blocked payments can mean:
- More support tickets
- More internal follow-ups
- More time spent checking payment status
- More uncertainty for recipients
- Longer time to successful payment delivery
As platforms scale globally, these exceptions become increasingly difficult to manage through email and spreadsheets. RFI management gives teams a structured way to handle one of the unavoidable realities of global payments: sometimes a payment needs more information before it can move forward.
The objective isn’t to eliminate compliance checks. It’s to make the process of resolving them faster, clearer, and easier to operate at scale.
Built for Both Operations and Developers
borderless is designed to give different teams the workflow that fits how they operate.
Finance and operations teams can use the dashboard to identify and resolve outstanding RFIs without relying on engineering.
Product and engineering teams can integrate RFI management directly into their own systems using the API and webhooks.
That means platforms don’t have to choose between operational simplicity and technical control. They can have both.
Available Now
RFI management is available now for all borderless accounts at no additional cost. Log in to your Borderless dashboard to see the new Needs Attention section, or review the API documentation to start integrating RFI management into your own workflows.
Global payments will always involve compliance requirements. Our goal is to make what happens when those requirements arise simple, visible, and actionable.