Hello,
We have been coming across a problem quite a bit lately that has us and our customers scratching their heads.
Sometimes, a patron will contact us after a payment has been authorized on their payment plan, letting us know that their credit card has been compromised, lost or is otherwise no longer valid. This causes great confusion for our front line staff, as they receive no indication that the payment has declined - quite the opposite, actually, in that the payments appear to be approved. The same is true for refunds onto credit cards.
Where is the disconnection between credit card payment/refund processing and the bank(??) letting us know that these credit cards no longer exist? Surely some responsibility of the patron is required to follow up regarding the status of their card... however, what is our responsibility or capability in knowing that a credit card shouldn't or does not work?
Thank you!
Tali,
This is very peculiar; when I run our monthly billing using the Pledge Billing utility, the output of the utility that I'm able to review notes when payments have been declined for credit cards and then the transaction line items on the pledge will actually note when something was Billed Without Payment.
When I run normal credit card transactions in a controlled batch, I also cannot close a batch for processing unless all of the credit card payments go through and are approved; I have to delete out the failed credit card attempt if there is one.
Are your staff members using the Pledge Billing utility to charge on the payment plan or is it a manual batch process? I feel like that's probably the first step in troubleshooting this.
Thank you,
Brian
Hello Brian,
The situation is actually a little more complicated than you have listed. When we process transactions on "invalid" credit cards, we are always able to process the credit card payment as normal without any issues. It is not until later, when a constituent contacts our offices to let us know that their credit card was stolen or compromised, that we learn of any errors associated with the card. The disconnection appears to be between Tessitura and the constituent's bank - why are payments being processed onto cards that no longer exist?
I hope that clear's up our conundrum!
Ah, sorry; that sounds very bizarre.
We're not able to process transactions at all if the credit cards are not good; it's an immediate stop to the batch process.
Sorry that it doesn't seem that I can be of more help on this!
There's quite a lot that stands between Tessitura and the constituent's bank: your payment gateway, your merchant processing platform, and the card network. When you authorize a payment, the card network is what talks to the bank and makes sure they're not over their limit (and that the card account is valid), and approves the charge.
Refunds are a bit different: the bank will usually approve the refund even if the card is expired or deactivated, since card numbers are never reused--they can still send that credit to the customer.
The biggest unknown in your question as far as I am concerned is when exactly the customer's card is supposed to have been deactivated. The assumption we should be comfortable making is that if Tessitura reports a payment has been authorized, that money is going to get in your merchant account. So without digging deeper, the default assumption would be that the customer's card was deactivated (on the card network level) AFTER you authorized the charge in Tessitura.
It should go without saying that if you try to swipe a card on a Square or other terminal and get declined, you should see the same behavior from Tessitura.
If there IS a discrepancy between Tessitura and your merchant account, the first place to look would be your payment gateway (Element/Vantiv/etc.). The payment gateway and tessitura should always be in agreement; any bugs here will be taken very seriously by Tessitura Network developers. If you're actually seeing a discrepancy between your payment gateway and your merchant account, then the people you need to talk to are your merchant bank.
My expectation would be that the only case where you would successfully authorize a card, but then not see that money in your merchant account, would be if the customer actually filed a chargeback. I don't believe it is standard practice among customer banks to file blanket chargebacks on all transactions if a card is compromised, for exactly this reason -- even if the card was lost or stolen, some of those charges would be valid autorenewals. In my own experience with card fraud, the bank identified with me exactly which charges were fraudulent.