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Virtual accounts on staging are issued by a sandbox bank that has no way to send money into them. That leaves a gap in testing: you can generate an account, but you cannot pay it, so a deposit can be started and never finished. The Payluk Test Bank closes that gap. It is a simulated bank that issues the account and gives you a funded float to pay it from. Paying an account drives the same settlement your live traffic runs: the same webhook, the same verification, the same wallet credit.
The test bank exists only on staging. On production, virtual accounts are issued by the real bank and every one of the routes below returns 404.

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Before you start

You need:
  • A sk_test_ secret key from your Payluk dashboard.
  • A merchant customer whose country is Nigeria. Virtual accounts are Nigerian-only.
A BVN on the customer makes no difference here. Dedicated accounts are a Paystack product, so they are only issued while Paystack is the active gateway; under Safe Haven every merchant customer gets the temporary account the test bank serves.

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1. Generate a virtual account

Call Generate virtual account with the customer’s id in the customer-id header:
On staging the account comes back from the test bank:
Two fields identify a simulated account: bank reads Payluk Test Bank, and accountNumber always begins with 99. The account is valid for 24 hours and accepts amount (₦100) or more.
Calling this endpoint again for the same customer within 24 hours returns the same account rather than issuing a new one.

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2. Pay the account from the test bank

Open the test bank in a browser:
The test bank is served by the checkout host (staging.live.payluk.ng), not by the merchant API host (staging.api.payluk.ng). Requesting it from the API host returns 404.
Then:
  1. Pick a source account under From. Three are provided, funded with ₦1,000,000, ₦250,000, and ₦100. The last one is there so you can test an insufficient-funds rejection.
  2. Paste the accountNumber from step 1 into To account number. The name resolves under the field once it matches an issued account, and the amount the account expects appears beneath Amount.
  3. Enter an amount and select Send money.
The receipt names the session id and confirms that the credit notification was delivered.
Drained a source account? Select Reset balances to restore the float.

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3. Confirm the wallet credited

The transfer credits the customer’s wallet through the same path a real deposit takes. Read the balance back with Get customer wallet:
The deposit also appears in Get payment history filtered to ?type=transfer, with status success.
A wallet top-up does not send a webhook to your callback URL. Payluk sends webhooks for escrow events, not for deposits. Poll the wallet or the payment history instead.
Once the wallet is funded, pay an escrow from it exactly as you would in production. See step 4 of the quickstart.

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What is and is not simulated

Simulated on staging

Virtual account issuance, the inbound transfer, the credit notification, and the wallet settlement that follows.

Not simulated

Payouts, bank lists, and account name enquiry against real banks. Those still run against the provider’s sandbox.

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Troubleshooting

The test bank only knows accounts it issued. Check that bank in the generate response read Payluk Test Bank and that the number begins with 99. An account issued more than 24 hours ago has expired: generate a new one.
The receipt reports whether the credit notification was delivered. If it reports a failure, the money moved inside the test bank but the notification did not reach Payluk. Retry the transfer, and if it keeps failing, send the session id from the receipt to your Payluk contact.
You are either on production, where the test bank does not exist, or you are calling the merchant API host rather than the checkout host. Use https://staging.live.payluk.ng.

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Paying an escrow checkout directly

If your customers pay through the Inline Checkout SDK rather than from a wallet balance, you do not need any of the steps above. On staging the checkout window shows a test bank account and a Pay from Payluk Test Bank button, which opens the bank with the account and amount already filled in. The window settles and closes on its own once the transfer lands.