About Account Updater (AU)
Credit card networks in the US and Europe offer a service called Account Updater (AU), which provides up-to-date customer credit card information to merchants who store card information for recurring billing. For Visa and Mastercard these are called Account Updater, for American Express it is called Cardrefresher. Customer credit card information can change for different reasons, such as lost or stolen cards, address changes, and account upgrades. The Issuing banks participating in the AU program provide updated credit card information to the Visa and MasterCard networks regularly. Payment processors submit daily queries to Visa and Mastercard to check for account updates and share query responses to participating merchants in daily reports. The AU service improves customer retention by keeping account information up to date without customer input, by preventing involuntary churn. The subscriptions remain active and customers continue to receive uninterrupted service. Vindicia can receive the updated account information from payment processors on your behalf and make required updates to the customer credit card information. Tip: We highly recommend that you participate in your payment processor’s AU service or program if you are using Vindicia Subscribe and your payment method is Credit Card.Overview of Vindicia Subscribe Support for AU
Vindicia Subscribe performs the following tasks on your behalf:- Requests an update for a card (Visa and Mastercard) or register the card (American Express)
- Receives updated information about stored cards and updates payment methods as appropriate
- Where applicable, retries billing using the updated payment method information
- Maintains a log of queries and updates for a payment method
- Provides several reports on the AU process
Note: The Paymentech Extraction Account Updater does not require a request for an update. Instead, it proactively sends updates for the merchant’s existing cards via request for response (RFR) API. With Paymentech Extraction Account Updater enabled, Vindicia can update cards, regardless of whether it used in a subscription as a payment method. To enable the Extraction Account Updater, contact your Chase Paymentech representative before contacting your Vindicia support representative.
Enabling Account Updater in Vindicia Retain or Subscribe
To enable Account Updater functionality in Retain or Subscribe, contact your Vindicia Solution Architect or a representative from Vindicia Client Technical Services (CTS). Note: Payment processor sandboxes typically do not support AU testing functionality. Since Vindicia’s sandbox environments (staging) are connected to payment processor sandboxes, it does not allow testing AU functionality in the Vindicia sandbox either.Enabling AU for Visa and Mastercard
To support AU for Visa and Mastercard, perform the following steps:- Verify that Vindicia Subscribe is integrated with AU service provided by your payment processor. You can contact Vindicia Solution Architect or CTS to get this information.
- Once verified, sign up for the AU service with the payment processor. During sign-up, choose the network (Visa, MasterCard, or both) and the region (US, Europe, or both). Note: The payment processor typically imposes fees for the AU service.
- Authorize Vindicia to submit AU requests and receive AU response reports on your behalf.
- Inform the Vindicia representative on how frequently to make the AU requests. For pre-billing updates, Vindicia recommends that AU requests be sent to the payment processor at least eight days prior to billing. A response to a request is usually received in two to four days.
Enabling AU for American Express (Cardrefresher)
To support account updates for American Express, sign an agreement with American Express that enables Vindicia to receive card updates on your behalf. You will receive an SE number that should be updated in Vindicia Subscribe. Generally, American Express cards are registered daily, and whenever there is an update for a registered card, it is sent to Vindicia Subscribe automatically, no request is needed.Best Practices for AU
Payment Providers usually charge merchants for each positive response to an update request. Therefore, choose your update request frequency to balance revenues from successful transactions with the costs involved in receiving updates. There are more such tips to implement AU in your system, like:-
During payment processing, there are several points in time when you want to know whether you have the most recent credit card data information:
- After a transaction fails (post-billing)—This is the most obvious time to ask for a credit card update. Vindicia requests an update after the first failure and before the last retry. This is called the post-billing method and is the default Vindicia Subscribe behavior.
- Before billing takes place (pre-billing)—This is primarily a preventive action to ensure greater billing success. The number of days is configurable, while the best practice is setting it to eight days. This is called the pre-billing method.
- Periodically—This is mainly used for merchants who have annual or quarterly plans and want to ensure that their customer card data is up to date. Updates can be set to periods of months, quarters or years. This is called the periodic method. For periodic updates, it is also possible to set separate periods per division, and/or per card type. You can choose to use one or more criteria (pre-billing, post-billing or periodic). Post-billing is the default method for all merchants who opt in for AU. However, you can choose to use one or more criteria (pre-billing, post-billing or periodic).
- For longer billing cycles (such as annual billing plans), if most of the billing plans you offer are annual or longer billing cycles, select periodic updates to keep the stored credit cards up to date. For example, if you have annual billing plans, submit an AU query every quarter for cards on file that have not participated in any billing attempt to ensure that most of stored credit cards are up to date before they are attempted to charge in the upcoming billing cycle.
- For billing plans with shorter billing cycles (such as monthly billing plans), selecting pre-bill updates would generally be sufficient. Request pre-bill updates with sufficient time to receive the payment processor response that can take up to eight days.
- Subscribe default AU behavior is to submit a card for an AU query upon billing failure. As a result it does not send a recurring billing failure email (Hard Error or Soft Error email notification) to the subscriber upon failure of the first billing attempt because there is no need to unnecessarily involve the subscriber if the credit card can be automatically updated using AU before the next retry billing attempt. Therefore, Vindicia’s best practice recommendation is to not override this default behavior. Note: Follow Vindicia’s best practice recommendation for the retry cycle. This recommendation allows adequate time between the initial billing attempt and the first retry to receive a response from the payment processor for an AU query.