The Card Account Updater (CAU) service is a game changer for merchants that use the Virtual Terminal's recurring billing and/or store customer profiles in CardPointe. With this new offering, out-of-date debit/credit card information (card number, expiration date, etc.) is updated to avoid recurring payment interruptions by reducing the frequency of declines. The best part? Updates are done behind the scenes with no customer intervention.
Card Account Updater reduces the number of declined or late payments resulting from outdated card information by automatically retrieving the new card details from Visa, Mastercard, and Discover when a new card is issued to your customers.
Card Account Updater is the perfect solution for merchants that offer auto-pay for recurring billing; It reduces the risk of late and declined payments for merchants and helps to prevent service disruptions for customers.
Using Card Account Updater to automatically retrieve new card data can help your business to:
Card Account Updater is an optional feature that must be enabled for your merchant account. Once enabled, all of your stored customer payment accounts are monitored on a continual basis to determine if the saved card data has become obsolete.
Some of the most common reasons that cause a customer's card data to become obsolete include:
When the Card Account Updater service receives updated card information from Visa, Mastercard, or Discover, your stored customer payment information is automatically updated with the new details, and can be used for any individual payments made using the CardPointe Virtual Terminal, or used for any upcoming scheduled payments that are part of a billing plan.
You can view card updates in CardPointe, on the Reporting > Card Updates tab. The Updater History table displays detailed information on all card account updates that occurred within the past year. See the CardPointe Web App User's Guide for more information.
Excludes gateway-only accounts
Contact your sales representative for pricing details, questions, or to add Card Account Updater to your account.
While these fees appear as default values in CoPilot, agents are free to adjust the merchant costs as they see fit.
Note: Agents are not allowed to charge merchants less than the agent costs listed below.
A 'Per Update Fee' is charged for each credit card that receives updated information from the card brands. If a card is checked for expired information but not updated, this fee will not be applied at the agent or merchant level.
To become eligible to sell Card Account Updater, please follow the below steps:
View the Status field of the CardPointe Account Updater add-on within the merchant account, which displays one of the following:
Cards will be declined if an authorization occurs in the time between when the card expires and when the update takes effect. Cards are submitted for checks on a daily basis, and updates can take up to five days to become available.
All cards (not just the default) underneath a customer profile are sent to check for an update. In CardPointe, there is no way to turn off a card from being checked.
The per update fee is charged for each credit card that receives updated information from the card brands. If a card is checked for expired information but not updated, there is no per update fee charged.
There will still be charges for updates with Visa's ContactC program, where the card information has changed but the customer has opted out of allowing Visa to share the changes.
The monthly and per update fees are line items on the merchant statement that comes directly from First Data. The statements show the number of updates that occurred, multiplied by the per update cost.
There is currently no reporting feature in CardPointe or CoPilot to allow merchants/agents to see which profiles that have been updated. This is an enhancement we have planned for the future.
The card brand regulations require merchants have a valid use case for the updater service (ie. subscription services, recurring billing, etc.). Per the regulations, the following MCCs are excluded from this service:
Note: Merchants with these MCCs are able to apply for the add-on, but will be filtered out before registration is sent to the card brands.
All ISOs can sell Card Account Updater.
To get started, please open a Profile Maintenance ticket in CoPilot - the Partner Admin team will then provide a partner addendum for you to sign.
Partners who board accounts that are both eligible and ineligible for Card Account Updater (ex: Omaha and North) will only see the add-on available for accounts that are eligible.
Partners can see which MIDs have the product by looking at the merchant's add-ons (CoPilot > Account Details > Add-ons).
Partners will see three line items:
The expense will appear underneath one MID (the account with the highest MID #) the first month that the partner has any activity in the Transaction Fee and Monthly Fee lines.
One-time setup fee: