A US Visa issuer has 60 seconds to make a domestic Fast Funds payout spendable. Everywhere else the Fast Funds clock is 30 minutes, and for a UK credit card Fast Funds is not mandatory at all: the issuer only has to post the money by the end of the business day. If your product says "instant payout", the card's country and type decide whether that is true.
Account Funding Transactions (AFTs) pull money off a card to fund something. Original Credit Transactions (OCTs) push money onto a card. The pages ranking for them are glossaries that define the terms and stop; none gives the codes, scheme rules or API fields a payout flow needs. Scheme rules here are from the Visa Rules edition of 18 April 2026, and PSP fields were checked against official docs and OpenAPI specs on 25 October 2026.
What Is an Account Funding Transaction (AFT)?
An AFT pulls funds from a Visa card to load another account: a wallet, a prepaid card, a brokerage account, or the first leg of a person-to-person transfer. It looks like a purchase to the cardholder, but it is not one. Visa's rules (section 7.4.1.1) say an AFT must not be a payment for goods or services or the funding of a merchant account.
Visa makes AFT coding compulsory for a specific list:
- reloading prepaid cards
- card-absent funding of P2P and account-to-account transfers
- funding disbursements from Visa corporate and business debit cards, such as payroll
- funding stored value and staged digital wallets, unless it is back-to-back funding
- buying liquid and cryptocurrency assets
The footnote is the part UK teams miss. For the card-absent condition, Visa adds "In the Europe Region: For all Merchants". In the UK and EEA, a wallet top-up at a terminal still has to be an AFT.
Every AFT must carry the AFT indicator and the correct business application identifier (BAI) in both the authorisation and the clearing record. Debt repayment was split by region from 25 July 2026: it must be an AFT in Asia Pacific, CEMEA and most of Latin America, and must not be one in Canada, Europe, the US, Chile and Puerto Rico. A UK lender taking card repayments should not flag them as AFTs.
What Is an Original Credit Transaction (OCT)?
An OCT pushes money onto a card. Visa defines it as a credit that "does not require a prior purchase", except when it is used as a Faster Refund. That is the key difference from a refund, which has to reference an original sale. Payroll, marketplace seller payouts, insurance claims and gambling winnings all travel as OCTs.
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About the Author
I'm Tom Wang, an AI Developer & Fintech Developer — building AI agents, crypto payment infrastructure, and cross-border payout systems with Rust, Go, and TypeScript. Based in London, UK.
Currently open to new opportunities in fintech, crypto payments, and AI agent engineering.
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