Developers › Payments

Currencies and settlement

Price in US or Belize dollars. Settlement is in Belize dollars either way.

Verified 6 November 2026Explain this to your team →

What the customer is charged

If you price in usd, the card is charged the Belize dollar equivalent. The payment records both figures and the rate it was taken at, so you can reconcile against a bank statement without having to reconstruct anything.

intent.amount;              // 6000  — what you asked for, in USD cents
intent.currency;            // "usd"
intent.settlement_amount;   // 12000 — what the card was charged, in BZD cents
intent.settlement_currency; // "BZD"
intent.fx_rate;             // 2

Mind the case. currency, and every other currency in the API — the balance, balance transactions, payouts, refunds, disputes — is lowercase. The one exception is settlement_currency on a payment intent, which is the uppercase ISO code "BZD". That is a guarantee, not an accident awaiting a fix: it will stay uppercase, so code that compares it with "BZD" keeps working. Compare currencies case-insensitively and you will never notice either way.

The three settlement fields are null until the payment has been attempted at the bank, because until then nothing has been converted and a number there would be a guess. They are also null in list responses, which carry the payment without its gateway attempt: retrieve the payment by id when you need them. A payment priced in BZD has a null fx_rate, because nothing was converted.

The rate is frozen

A payment’s rate is fixed when it is taken. A capture or refund months later uses that rate, not whatever today’s is — so refunding a payment in full returns exactly what was charged, and never a few cents more or less because a rate moved in between.

The Belize dollar has been pegged to the US dollar at two to one for decades, so in practice the rate is 2. It is still recorded on every payment rather than assumed, because a figure you can read is worth more than one you have to trust.

Which to price in

Price in whichever your customers think in. Pricing in usd means an American customer sees a round number and a Belizean card is charged the equivalent; pricing in bzd is the reverse. Neither costs more.