Overview

Character Set and Encoding

CURO uses the default character set of the XML specification, UTF-8. ASCII 0 – 127 characters are also valid UTF-8 characters.

Security

Connection to the API is only possible using HTTPS (HTTP over SSL) Internet connection, encrypted with 2048-bit encryption.

API Entry-Points

All requests are made to API end-points. There are two available entry-points in this CURO API.

API Authentication

Access to the API is granted via HTTP Basic access authentication over SSL protocol. The "username" and "password" are your merchant_id or account-name and API key respectively. These need to be supplied with each request for a valid communication with the API.

$sMerchant = 'your-account-name';
$sAPI_Key  = 'your-API-secret-provided-by-CURO';

Using CURL in PHP you can set the authentication information like this:

// set HTTP Basic Authentication
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $sMerchant . ':' . $sAPI_Key);

Passing authentication information in the request header:

header('WWW-Authenticate: Basic' . base64_encode($sMerchant . ':' . $sAPI_Key));

Each merchant has their own user-name and API key known to you and CURO only. Don't ever share these credentials — if someone else gets a hold of it, they'll be able to access anything within given privileges.

Supported Formats

The API is able to process request and response in different formats. This gives you a great flexibility in usage of the API. You can either pass the desired format in a variable, or using the HTTP Accept: header. The default format for the CURO protocol is JSON.