Core Concepts

In addition to the core principals of our API, please also review the API restrictions that apply across all endpoints.

Listing Data

Our API provides endpoints to list the data you have access to — such as organizations, cardholders, cards, and transactions, just to name a few.

These listing endpoints are a great starting point for exploring Pliant. They give you a high-level overview of your accessible data, without diving into excessive detail.

Getting Details

Single Entity

You can fetch detailed information about a specific entity — whether it’s an organization, card, or transaction. These endpoints return all the details we have for that particular item.

Multiple Entities

Need to retrieve details for 10, 100, or even 1,000 cards? We’ve got you covered. Use our batch endpoints to get details for multiple entities in a single request — no need to loop or make individual calls. Just provide the relevant identifiers, and we’ll return the associated data.

Get Informed via Callbacks

Stay up-to-date with near real-time notifications. We can alert you when key events occur — like a new transaction, a receipt upload, or a change in an organization's onboarding status.

To avoid unnecessary noise, you can subscribe only to the event types you care about. This gives you full control over which notifications you receive.

Asynchrony

All mutating operations (create, update, delete) in our API are asynchronous from the API consumer's perspective, but synchronous within the operation itself.

What does that mean?

For example, when you issue a new card:

• The card is immediately issued and usable (e.g. for transactions) once the HTTP request returns.
• However, the data across the system may take 1–2 seconds to reflect this change.
• You should wait for the corresponding callback to be triggered before updating your local data, to ensure consistency.

This concept — immediate action, eventual data consistency — is critical to understand.

Another example: when you lock a card, the lock takes effect immediately upon a successful response from the endpoint. However, the card details endpoint might still temporarily show the card as active. This doesn’t impact functionality — the card is locked and cannot be used — but the updated status will be reflected once the callback is received.

To indicate this asynchronous behavior:

• Mutating endpoints return HTTP 202 Accepted or 204 No Content.
• Synchronous endpoints (like reading data) return HTTP 200 OK.