Do you hate it when you want to cancel a recurring billing service, but the business doesn’t let you cancel online and instead provided a phone number? Merchants offering SaaS or any recurring billing sign-up online, must allow customers to cancel online to comply with the Visa Stored Credential mandate.

What if a business does not allow you to cancel online? Report Visa violations here https://usa.visa.com/Forms/visa-rules.html. It says for in store only, but there is a check box for recurring transactions. The web site also says to contact your financial institution via the phone number on the back of the card.

The basis for the change is to enable customers more control over their purchasing, and stored card management. It makes sense if you can buy online 24/7, then you should be able to cancel online 24/7.

Rules for merchants to store cards and use stored cards changed dramatically in 2017, with enforcement beginning last year. Compliance is not automatic. Payment gateways manage most of the technical details, however, not all payment gateways are capable yet. Compliance is not optional and merchants are getting notices of violations subject to assessments and fines if not resolved. If your payment gateway or integrated solution does not support the needs to comply with the stored credential mandate, contact your acquirer, or credit card processor, to request a temporary waiver.

Call Christine Speedy, CenPOS Global Sales. 954-942-0483, 9-5 ET for all your recurring billing and stored credential payment gateway and virtual terminal needs. CenPOS is an integrated commerce technology platform driving innovative, omnichannel solutions tailored to meet a merchant’s market needs. Providing a single point of integration, the CenPOS platform combines payment, commerce and value-added functionality enabling merchants to transform their commerce experience, eliminate the need to manage complex integrations, reduce the burden of accepting payments and create deeper customer relationships.

MasterCard monitors the transaction data detail submitted by the acquirers, or merchant processors, to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the data. Data integrity reporting is accessible by acquirers and when problems are found, merchants are notified, typically with a short timeframe to correct the problem before non-compliance assessments and fines will be allocated.

Merchants often experience an increase in Data Integrity failures when not compliant with changing rules. For example, a MasterCard Data Integrity reporting as failing Edit 21, Recurring CoF Monitoring, refers to using a stored Credential On File for recurring billing. These are merchant initiated transactions on a fixed schedule for a fixed amount. Per MasterCard, all recurring payments are considered credential-on-file transactions. 

“MasterCard requires POS entry mode= 10 (credential-on-file) to be sent for transactions identified as recurring.  Please work with the POS vendor and these locations to correct the POS entry mode. If corrections are not completed, merchants are subject to non-compliance assessments and fines will be allocated.”

POS is an abbreviation for Point of Sale, even though recurring billing is not run via a traditional point of sale device. The payment gateway is critical to compliance and most likely is not sending the correct data, though it’s possible problems exist in other areas of the payment ecosystem, for example, with the acquirer. All US merchants are required to be compliant with stored credential rules that rolled out over 2017 to 2018. Some gateways now support the correct data set for recurring billing, but still lack support for Installment and Unscheduled. Payment gateways and solutions providers rarely advise merchants when they don’t have a solution, just when they have something new. Thus businesses may be in for a surprise with an urgent notice to correct a compliance violation.

Call Christine Speedy, CenPOS Global Sales. 954-942-0483, 9-5 ET for all your recurring billing and stored credential payment gateway and virtual terminal needs. CenPOS is an integrated commerce technology platform driving innovative, omnichannel solutions tailored to meet a merchant’s market needs. Providing a single point of integration, the CenPOS platform combines payment, commerce and value-added functionality enabling merchants to transform their commerce experience, eliminate the need to manage complex integrations, reduce the burden of accepting payments and create deeper customer relationships.