A webhook is a web callback that Belvo uses to send notifications about a specific link.

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Institution status webhook

In addition to Belvo's own webhooks, you can also subscribe to our statuspage.io Institution status webhook to receive up to date information regarding any outages an institution is experiencing. For more information, see our dedicated Institution status (external webhook) guide.

How do webhooks work?

Belvo automatically refreshes recurrent links on a daily basis to retrieve fresh content. Once we refresh a link, we notify your application of any interesting events that occur. This can include information such as new transactions, link credentials have changed, and so on.

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Recurrent links and frequency

Webhooks only work with recurrent links. For more information on recurrent links and how they are refreshed, check out our recurrent link documentation.

If you have set up your recurrent links to be refreshed every 6 or 12 hours, you can receive webhook events with the same frequency.

To start receiving webhook events, you need to set up a webhook URL.

Setup webhooks

To set up a new webhook:

1. From the Environment Switcher in your Belvo dashboard, select the environment you want to create a new webhook in.
2. Select the Webhooks tab and click +New webhook.
3. Enter in the required information in the New webhook form.
   1. URL: the URL to receive the webhook notifications.
   2. Authorization: an optional bearer token to use if your URL is protected.
4. Click Create webhook.

✳️ Done! The webhook is now setup and your application will be notified of new events related to your links.

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Using additional authentication

For security reasons, you can add an additional layer of authentication to your webhook calls. When you create your webhook, in the Authentication (Optional) field, enter either:

• Basic and a base64-encoded username:password string (for Basic authentication)
• Bearer and a token (for Bearer authentication)

Webhook events

All webhook events come with a core payload (as described in the code example).

{
  "webhook_id": "aadf41a1fc8e4f79a49f7f04027ac999", // Belvo webhook ID
  "webhook_type": "ACCOUNTS", // From what endpoint the webhook is from
  "webhook_code": "historical_update", // Webhook type
  "link_id": "16f68516-bcbc-4cf7-b815-c500d4204e28", // Link 
  "data": { 
    // Contents of the webhook. For more information, please see the relative Webhook type documentation.
    
  }
}

For information about the data specific for a given webhook, just click on the webhook Type in the table below.

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Webhooks in the Sandbox environment

At the moment our Sandbox environment does not support LINK webhook event types.

For all other webhook types, you will always get a historical event when you create a link in an institution. However, to get "new" events, you need to go to your Belvo Dashboard and manually trigger an event to occur.

Webhook retries

If Belvo initially calls an institution to refresh data and does not receive a 2xx HTTP status code (indicating that we can retrieve information), we will retry five times using a linear backoff to allow the institution's server to recover from any malfunction.

Webhook errors

Sometimes while retrieving information from an institution, an error can occur. In this case, the webhook event’s data object will contain the error information that occurred. For example:

{
    "webhook_id": "5b82fdf536da43039c69a4305ecb1ceb",
    "webhook_type": "ACCOUNTS",
    "webhook_code": "historical_update",
    "link_id": "c7ba4551-ed8d-46ee-9b67-c864a77d6381",
    "data": {
        "errors": [ // Details of the error that occurred
            {
              "code": "service_unavailable",
              "message": "Belvo is unable to process the request due to an internal system issue or to an unsupported response from an institution"
            }
        ]
    }
}

Trigger Webhook Events

You can trigger any webhook event type (including link events) from your Belvo Dashboard. Once triggered, you will receive a payload with dummy data. This is an excellent way to test if you can receive webhooks as well as act upon the various event types.

To trigger an event:

1. From the Environment Switcher in your Belvo dashboard, select the environment you want to test your webhook in.
2. Select the Webhooks tab.
3. Click on the drop-down menu next to the Sandbox webhook URL you want to test.
4. Select the webhook event type you want. This sends the webhook.
5. Expand the status box to see details of the webhook event.