Blackbaud Merchant Services

Retain tokens for a month after a failed transaction

Currently, BBMS retains and continues to process credit/debit cards that have expired for up to six months, provided that the card is still honored by the issuing bank.  At that time, the token is discarded.  For monthly donors, this means that by the time the recurring transaction fails, the token is gone.  If the card number is still valid and you only need to change the expiration date, it's too late; you have to get the whole card number again.

A better method would be to keep the token around for a while (at least a week, maybe even a month) after the first rejected transaction.

  • Guest
  • Jan 16 2018
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  • Deleted User commented
    January 18, 2018 18:37

    I wanted to reach out regarding your suggestion for keeping Blackbaud Payment Services (BBPS) tokens. As you know we purge expired card data after 6 months, this is to help ensure we are passing the most up-to-date information and avoid passing bad data to a bank which can make a transaction appear fraudulent. A way to proactively catch cards before they reach expiration would be to use BBMS Credit Card Updater service with Raiser’s Edge (your current product in use).

     

    Credit Card Updater (CCU) is for organizations that have a recurring giving program. To help keep information about your constituents' credit card numbers and expiration dates current, Blackbaud Merchant Services partners with Visa Account Updater, MasterCard Automatic Billing Updater, Discover Network Account Updater, and American Express Cardrefresher to analyze and update credit cards in your system that are expired, cards that are reported as lost or stolen, or newly issued EMV cards.  The CCU service helps ensure you can continue processing cards in these situations without losing your regular givers. 

     

    The pricing is $.30 per updated card or $30 monthly minimum billed only on months of update activity. What that breaks down to is, if over 100 card tokens are updated you are charged $0.30/update. If there are 1-100 cards updated the cost is $30/month. In months where there are no updates there is no charge. We typically see 10-20% of eligible cards in the database get updated in the first month and then 2-5% of cards update each month moving forward.

     

    The service updates cards in your database once per month on the 10th-13th.  This is one of our most popular services for organizations that have a recurring giving program, the cost for card updates pays for itself.

     

    Another great way to seek expired cards in the database proactively would be to use this query:

    1. Open The Raiser's Edge
    2. Click on Query
    3. Click on New Query
    4. Select Constituent for Query Type
    5. Select Dynamic for Query Format
    6. Click OK
    7. In the Criteria Tab, From the Available Fields drop down menu, select Credit Cards
    8. Double-click on Credit Card Expires
    9. This step can be completed a couple of ways:
    1. We can find credit cards that will expire soon (i.e. this year or this month):  select equals from the Operator menu and This Calendar Year or This month from the Date menu
    2. We can find credit cards that are already expired: select the Operator "Less Than", the Date "<Fuzzy Date>, and type in desired alert date in format mm/dd/yyyy in the value field.
    3. Or we can include both sets of criteria to only have one query for all of the above by completing step 8 and 9 once for each set of criteria.
    1. Click OK
    2. Click on the Output tab
    3. From the Available Fields dropdown menu, select Constituent Information 
    4. Double-click on Name
    5. Click File > Save
    6. Type in a name for the Query (i.e. expired/expiring credit cards)
    7. Select the category to save the Query in
    8. Unmark "Other users may modify this query"
    9. Click Save.