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:
 
• Lloyds TSB Cardnet
• Barclaycard Merchant Services
• Bank of Scotland
• HSBC
• Streamline
• Elavon (Bank of Ireland & Alliance and Leicester Merchant Acquirer)
• Allied Irish Bank
 
The only cards currently supported for Continuous Authority are all MasterCard and Visa ONLY. (SWITCH & Maestro cards are not supported).