Automatically update the account information of customers cards to prevent lost revenue, drive operational efficiencies and dramatically reduce friction to the payment process.

What are the challenges of maintaining up-to-date customer card information?

Cardholder’s credit and debit card information often changes as a result of cards expiring, being lost or stolen, or other changes to their account. The issue is that cardholders are often unaware, or don’t want the trouble of manually updating their payment information when it becomes out of date. For merchants, contacting the customer to update each individual card on file when a transaction fails can be time consuming and costly. It is estimated that subscription-based businesses can lose up to 5-10% of their annual revenue  due to out-of-date customer billing addresses or credit card information.

How are the card schemes involved?

Visa and MasterCard both run a service which allows businesses to connect into each of their respective hosted databases to obtain new card details for those cards that have either expired, are due to expire at the end of the current month, or have been reported lost or stolen. With Acquired, your business can access the Mastercard Automatic Billing Updater and Visa Account Updater services through a single integration. We have designed the Acquired Account Updater Service to be as seamless as possible, we will initiate a request on your behalf.

How does the Account Updater Service work?

  1. Merchant tries to process an authorisation request against a stored card with out-of-date payment information
  2. Acquired will automatically check if new card details are available
  3. If new details are available, we will automatically update the token within our environment with the new details.
  4. We will inform you of this update via webhook.
  5. Once a card is updated, when the next payment attempt is due to take place, the request should be successfully authorised.

This creates a frictionless process where merchants can reduce their back-office processes and maximise payments success whilst simultaneously minimising costs.

Who is this service designed for?

The Acquired Account Updater Service is designed for companies that rely on repeat billing and have high volumes of subscriptions, memberships and recurring payments. The Account Updater service aims to maintain continuity in customer payment relationships.

 What are the financial benefits for merchants?

Trying to process an expired or invalid payment card and individually contacting customers to update the card details is estimated to cost merchants around £30 per card. The Acquired Account Updater service can drive up to 20 times return on investment which helps to retain customer loyalty through uninterrupted payment cycles as well as dramatically reducing operational costs.

The Acquired Hub provides a step-by-step guide to our Account Updater Service and if you are interested in finding out more about preventing lost revenue due to out-of-date payment information please get in touch.