Messages

Overview

Messages is where Surfboard talks to you as a partner. When we publish a notice that affects your portfolio — a settlement change, an integration or API update, planned maintenance, a service change — it lands here, in the portal, addressed to your partner account.

You’ll find it in the sidebar under Support → Messages. A badge on the menu item shows how many notices are unread.

Important: Subscribe an email address on the Messages page as soon as your partner account is set up. An inbox only works if someone opens it. With a subscription, every notice also goes out as an email, so the people who run your integration and your merchant operations hear about a change the moment we publish it — not the next time somebody logs in.

Reading Messages

The page lists every notice sent to your partner account, newest first. Each one shows:

• Title and the date it was published
• Severity — Info, Warning, or Critical
• An unread dot until it has been opened

Click a message to expand it. Some include a link to the relevant page in the portal, to a guide, or to the developer documentation. Once opened, a message is marked as read and the badge count goes down.

Critical notices also appear as a banner across the top of the portal until they are read.

Subscribe to Email Notifications

At the bottom of the Messages page is the Email notifications card. Any address you add here receives every notice we publish to your partner account as a branded email, in addition to it appearing in the portal.

To subscribe an address:

1. Open Support → Messages and scroll to Email notifications.
2. Enter the address — the placeholder suggests notifications@yourcompany.com — and click Add.
3. We send a confirmation link to that address. Until it’s clicked, the address shows as Pending and receives nothing.
4. Once confirmed, the status changes to Active and notifications start with the next notice.

If the confirmation email didn’t arrive, click Resend next to the pending address. To stop emails to an address, use Remove address next to it.

Which address to use

Subscriptions belong to your partner account, not to an individual user, and the address does not need to be a portal login. Use shared mailboxes so a notice survives holidays and staff changes:

• finance@ for settlement and payout notices
• integrations@ or your engineering on-call address, so API and integration changes reach the people who maintain your connection
• support@ or your merchant-facing team, who are the ones merchants call when a terminal behaves differently

You can add several. Anyone on your team with portal access can add or remove addresses.

Tip: Nothing is subscribed by default. A new partner account starts with an empty list, so if you skip this step the notices only live in the portal.

Messages vs. Notifications

Messages are notices from Surfboard to you. The Notifications section under Settings is different: those are event alerts about your own portfolio — merchant onboarding, terminal registration, file transfers, application status — delivered by email, Slack, or SFTP. Set up both.

Why It Matters

As a partner you sit between Surfboard and your merchants. When we change a settlement schedule, retire an API version, or schedule maintenance, your merchants will ask you first. A subscribed shared mailbox means your team already knows.