Set up Recurring Payment

PXP Financial offers 2 different models to fulfill Recurring Payment functionality for merchants. The first is a full service model known as the Recurring Transaction Service, and the second is the pass-through model used for merchants that only require the gateway capabilities offered by PXP Financial.

Recurring Transaction Service

The Recurring Transaction Service - which is also known as Automatic Billing, Recurring Payments or Payment Subscriptions - allows merchants to automatically charge their customers periodically for credit card payment methods. This is currently implemented for MasterCard, Visa and Maestro through the PXP Financial's Acquiring Licence.
In order to make use of the Recurring Transaction Service, the merchant must have pre-configured Plans set up in conjunction with PXP Financial's Merchant Integration Team. A Plan allows the merchant to define:

• The schedule: daily/weekly/monthly
• Allowed payment methods and currencies
• Recurrence amount
• Number of recurrences, or define that the recurrence will run infinitely
• Specific routings per payment method and creation type: this can be used to ensure that the PaymentService MOTO Interface can be used to initiate MOTO payments for example

Once the Plan profiles are correctly set up and configured – as a merchant can have multiple plans – the merchant will only need to initiate the first transaction with the relevant Plan ID (see Backend2Backend Integration) and standard card and payment amount details. For merchants using the PXP Financial Checkout, after the Plan ID is sent in the getRedirectData request (see Redirect Integration) the customer will be prompted to approve setup of a recurring agreement.

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Using Card Verification before the first payment

The merchant can optionally make use of the Card Verification payment methods (see Card Verifications) to trigger an Account Status Inquiry for the cardholder to ensure that the cardholder account is valid, before initiating the first authorization with the Plan.

If the first transaction is successfully authorised then the Recurring Transaction Plan generates a corresponding Agreement containing all current and future details of the recurring transactions that will be generated following the initial successful recurring transaction. Each subsequent transaction generated according to the specified schedule will be tracked by the Agreement. The Agreement ID will be returned to the merchant in the response to the original authorisation (see Backend2Backend Integration). Once the Agreement is created, a merchant can perform number of actions on it:

• Cancellation (in the Payment Service Admin Tool)
• Suspension (in the Payment Service Admin Tool)

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Service availability

Service is not available for recurring refunds or recurring withdrawals.

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Automatic update of card data

Please note that to use the Recurring Transaction Service, a merchant will need to perform the relevant registrations steps with the support of PXP Financial's Merchant Integration Team in order to take advantage of the Visa Account Updater (VAU) and MasterCard Automatic Billing Updater (ABU) Services, which are a required part of setup in PXP Financial’s primary markets (UK and EU). These Services ensure that cardholder changes are communicated to PXP Financial in advance of the cards expiring so that the system keeps up-to-date card information, avoiding failed transactions which can be common for recurring payments which can run for extended periods of months or years. The overall benefit of this is increased success rates for recurring payments. The Services also inform PXP Financial of Issuer advices regarding stopping or suspending the card for recurring payments based on external monitored factors such as risk and fraud.

Recurring Transactions through Gateway

PXP Financial also supports the processing of recurring transactions when the merchant already has a Recurring Transaction Service. In this case, the merchant need only send an authorisation request flagged with the correct Creation Type (see Creation Types) and the relevant card details (CVV/CVC information not required).
Refer to the following sections for sample requests for Recurring Payments through our Redirect integrations and Backend2Backend.

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Guidance: Submitting the first payment in a recurring sequence

Please ensure that when making the first payment in a recurring sequence of payments with the creationTypeID = 4 (Ecom Recurring) the following data is provided in order to perform Strong Customer Authentication with 3DS2 correctly:
IsInitialPayment = true
RecurringFrequencyInDays
RecurringExpirationDate

The requirements concern both MasterCard and Visa.

After successful authorisation, you are going to receive the following data that can be used in the subsequent recurring payments:

• SchemeSettlementDate [MasterCard payments only)
• SchemeTransactionIdentifier

More information can be found on Handling Recurring Payments section on PSD2 Implementation Guideline page.