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A payment can fail while Melio collects the funds from your internal account or while it delivers them to the payee. Either way the payment moves to failed, and Melio settles the money automatically. Here is what happens and how to recover.

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What can fail

  • Collection - the debit from your internal (funding) account does not go through.
  • Delivery - the funds cannot be delivered to the payee, or the transfer is returned.
A payment can also be stopped during risk review; see Payment lifecycle.

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How Melio handles it

Melio does not automatically retry a failed payment. To try again, create a new payment.

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How you find out

Melio sends api.payment.updated; fetch the payment to see it is now failed.
The business is also emailed about the failure. For a delivery failure the email confirms the funds are being refunded and the expected timing. If you would rather handle these notifications yourself, ask Melio to configure which failure emails are sent.

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How to recover

Create a new payment with corrected details (for example a different receiving account):
There is no retry on the same payment; recovery is always a new POST /payments.

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Test failures in the sandbox

Drive a payment to failed in a non-production environment with the simulation endpoint, so you can build and verify your handling before going live. It is available in non-production only and returns 404 in production.
Use fail-collect for a collection failure and fail-deliver for a delivery failure. The reason is optional free text recorded on the action.
Related: an undeposited check is automatically voided after 90 days, and the payment is refunded like any other delivery failure.