Blackbaud Merchant Services

Expiration Date Guess and Incremental Adjustment available/enabled for BBMS

In reference to case number 017031368 regarding expiration date guessing in Blackbaud Merchant Services. Often when a credit card expires, the owner of the card receives a new identical card with a new expiration date. Often the owner does not think to contact the NGO (Save the Children) to update their recurring gift. The system can automatically try to guess the new expiration date so that the gift can continue processing, but that functionality or SDP's is not available for BBMS. 

Proposing site data parameter is enabled for BBMS: 

EXP_DATE_MODIFICATIONS: Set this value to one or more of the following separated by commas. This setting only applies to expired cards.

  • ORIG = Original expiration date.
  • ZERO = Zero out the expiration date.
  • <Number> = Number of years to increment the date by
  • E.g. if you specify ORIG, ZERO, 1, 2, 3 - it will try the original date first, then zeroing it out and then adding 1 year etc.

Relationships between subscription merchants and their customers are under great duress these days in the card-not-present, recurring marketplace:  46.6 million cards were compromised in 2013 and 64.4 million were compromised in 2014; All 1.5 Billion US credit cards were re-issued through 2016, with chips. 50 million primary credit card accounts are near or over their credit limits; 20% of cardholders are delinquent annually; up to 25% of new subscriptions are being launched on prepaid instruments for which there will be little in the way of downstream available funds.

That said, we need to utilize proven tactic to improve sustaining gift processing success - which includes the expiration guess functionality.  

  • Guest
  • Jan 22 2019
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  • Lee Turner commented
    June 24, 2019 15:53

    Hi there,

    I wanted to follow up on this after our recent phone conversation. As a recap, we don't recommend guessing expiration dates as this increases decline rates and can negatively impact an organization's relationship with card networks, but I can absolutely understand the success that can be obtained by it. Blackbaud will explore ways to make our Credit Card Updater capability more dynamic in order to account for cards that are updated between the monthly Credit Card Updater process and the processing of the monthly payment. Our goal is to provide reliable ways to retry payments and update cards to prevent lost donations. Thanks for your time last week!

    Kind regards,

    Lee Turner, FinTech Senior Product Manager