Reference

VTU & API glossary

The airtime, data, bill-payment and developer terms you’ll meet when integrating Plustive — defined plainly, one entry at a time.

VTU · Virtual Top-Up

Virtual Top-Up — recharging a phone or service electronically instead of with a physical scratch card. A VTU platform sells airtime, data and bill payments digitally, and a VTU API exposes that capability to software.

Airtime

Prepaid call/SMS credit loaded directly onto a phone number on a mobile network (MTN, Glo, Airtel or 9mobile in Nigeria). Over an API, airtime is bought by sending a network, a phone number and an amount in kobo.

Data bundle

A fixed allocation of mobile internet (e.g. 1GB for 30 days) sold against a plan code for a specific network. Unlike airtime, data is bought by plan, not by free-form amount.

Bill payment

Paying a third-party biller — electricity, cable TV, internet or an exam body — on behalf of a customer. Bill payments usually require a verification step first to confirm the customer’s account or meter is valid.

Biller

The organisation that ultimately receives a bill payment — a power distribution company, a pay-TV operator, an ISP or an exam board. Each biller exposes its own products and verification rules.

Disco · DISCO

Distribution Company — a Nigerian electricity provider such as Ikeja Electric, EKEDC or AEDC. Discos sell prepaid (token) and postpaid electricity; prepaid vends return a recharge token.

Prepaid meter token · recharge token

A 20-digit code returned when you buy prepaid electricity. The customer keys it into their meter to load the units. A bill-payment API must return this token in the purchase response.

Result-checker PIN · e-PIN

A single-use voucher students buy to check exam results online (WAEC, NECO) or to create a JAMB profile. Education products are sold as PINs, with no customer verification step.

Dedicated Virtual Account · DVA

A unique bank account number assigned to one customer so that any transfer into it is automatically attributed to and credited to that customer’s wallet. Plustive provisions a DVA per business to fund its prepaid wallet by bank transfer.

NUBAN

Nigeria Uniform Bank Account Number — the standard 10-digit account number format used by Nigerian banks. A dedicated virtual account is issued as a NUBAN at a partner bank.

Kobo

The minor unit of the Nigerian naira: ₦1 = 100 kobo. APIs represent money as an integer number of kobo (₦50 = 5000) to avoid floating-point rounding errors.

Prepaid wallet

A balance you fund in advance and draw down as you transact. Plustive debits the wallet for each purchase, so there is no per-transaction card charge and spend is capped by the funded balance.

Idempotency key · clientReference

A unique identifier you attach to a request so that retrying it never repeats the side effect. If a network timeout makes you resend a purchase, the same clientReference returns the original result instead of buying twice.

Webhook

A server-to-server HTTP callback the API sends to a URL you register when a transaction reaches its final state. Webhooks let you update your records without polling; they are signed so you can verify they came from the provider.

Reconciliation

Confirming the true final state of a transaction with the upstream provider when the immediate response was ambiguous (e.g. a timeout). A reliable VTU API reconciles automatically and refunds the wallet if a purchase ultimately failed.

Settlement

Applying funds that have cleared — for example, crediting a wallet when a bank transfer to a dedicated virtual account is confirmed, and clearing any outstanding balance it covers.

Sandbox

A test environment with separate credentials and a separate base URL that mimics the live API without moving real money. Sandbox keys are rejected by the production endpoints, and vice versa.