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Credit card decline spike

David Wanless

Dear all,

At the Blackbaud user group recently it was mentioned that various organisations had experienced a spike in credit card declines earlier this year. We would be very interested to know more about this. If your organisation experienced this, or you have any understanding about what other organisations might have experienced, we'd love to know anything, e.g., when it started, the nature of it (how it manifests, e.g., which error codes if it is specific, which types of cards it applies to), why it happened, what you did to resolve it and how large a problem it was (was it a handful of records, scores, hundreds, …)?

Thanks,

David Wanless.

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Comments

Simon Watson

@David Wanless
Hi David. At ANU we haven't experienced any spikes…. but our volume is quite low so not really comparable.

Jenny Goeby

@David Wanless we noticed a massive spike. Normally, we get less than 10 ‘expired card’ rejections per month, but in May, June and July there were over 150. Unfortunately for us, this coincided with our move to Azure - so our initial investigations were all focused on the assumption that we suddenly appeared to be a new merchant and the banks no longer accepted our expired cards.
On further investigation, I could see that a few had come the day before we moved to Azure. I looked further and noted that many of the ‘expired cards’ actually had future dated expiry dates and many cards that WERE expired were still going through. There didn't appear to be a solid answer. Blackbaud support provided no explanation.

We decided to retry the ‘expired cards' without changing anything. Some were successful, some were still rejected. By the end of July we still had a few that were still being rejected with ‘expired card’. The only pattern we noticed on these ones was that they all came from CBA.

After the last BBUG, Richard sent through the following explanation:

When Blackbaud upgraded to our Stripe Payment Intents API back in the end of May – transactions are sent via the new API and as part of that API, we had to restamp offline recurring gifts with the universal MOTO flag to show it as a back office recurring transaction and to remove fraudulent parameter checks.
Now, this change should not have caused any issues – but it did. Some Banking institutions are inconsistently applying the parameters. The two countries that had spikes in rejections for the MOTO flag was Australia and Canada. For example, the Commonwealth Bank accepted and declined the same MOTO flag. Complete inconsistency – especially with MOTO world renowned for back-office transaction.
Blackbaud then worked with Stripe and the scheme and applied a workflow that we still stamped our tables with the MOTO flag but now forward a flag of Is_recurring_offline – that we were assured would be more accepted by ALL.
Hope this helps,
Richard Baraket
Senior Principal Account Executive
Blackbaud Pacific Sales

David Wanless

Thanks @Jenny Goeby. That's really helpful.

Ciao,

David.