Continuous Authority
What is Continuous Authority?
Continuous Authority transactions, otherwise known as Recurring Billing, is an industry wide term used to describe a transaction for which a cardholder grants written permission to a Vendor to periodically charge their card for recurring goods or services such as club membership or magazine subscriptions.
While the Sage Pay system is not set up specifically with Recurring Billing or Subscription Payment services, it is possible to process repeat transactions against original Internet transactions using a Continuous Authority Internet Merchant Number via our Payment Gateway system.
Continuous Authority is for vendors who regularly take payments from shopper's cards (weekly, monthly or yearly). Sage Pay provide a Repeat transaction type option on all Sage Pay accounts but this is for the occasional repeated transaction, not for multiple repeats. The banks will provide a Continuous Authority Internet Merchant number for all vendors who wish to process repeat payments of this nature.
Regular transactions that are processed online with the banks require a CV2 Value and an Expiry date. But CV2 values cannot be stored and expiry dates can expire, so processing a Repeat transaction has its restrictions.
Continuous Authority transactions do not require a CV2 value or expiry date. The initial regular transaction, once verified, will be a trusted card and so subsequent repeats of this transaction will not need to have the data passed again. If the card expires, as long as the card number has not changed, it can still be processed.
The banks that currently support CA
At present, Sage Pay are only set up to work with Continuous Authority Internet Merchant Numbers from the following acquiring banks:
The only cards currently supported for Continuous Authority are all Mastercard and Visa ONLY. (SWITCH, Maestro & SOLO cards are not supported).
How does continuous authority work?
Continuous Authority transactions are processed as the ‘REPEAT’ Payment type within the Sage Pay system. HSBC have provided you with one merchant number for the normal transactions (PAYMENT) and for Continuous Authority (REPEAT) transactions.
A normal transaction (a PAYMENT that requires a CV2 Value and an Expiry date) must be processed first and then following this, REPEAT transactions may be performed on the original transaction without the need to send a CV2 value or expiry date.
The amount of the initial transaction has no relevance, as you can repeat for any amount below / above the previous PAYMENT/REPEAT. With regards to any cards that expire, as long as the card number has not changed, it can still be processed.
Any original payments you post to Sage Pay should be sent with the Account Type of E (for ecommerce payments) or M (for Mail Order Telephone Order payments) whereas the REPEAT payments should use an account type of C. This will allow Sage Pay to flag the transaction appropriately.
Now if the card number changes, the original transaction will no longer be able to be repeated. Instead a brand new regular transaction (PAYMENT) will have to be processed with these new card details in order to allow you to subsequently repeat it. So whenever your customers’ change their card details on the site a new PAYMENT has to be processed to allow subsequent Continuous Authority REPEAT payments to be processed against these new details.