Address verification questions

Hello All

Great question Jess. 

We have also been thinking of turning this on but years ago, there were too many issues.  So if you could share how things are going now, I would appreciate your thoughts.  Also, payment plans were an issue, has this improved at all?

 Thanks

Debbie

One thing to keep in mind, it is my understanding that there is no libality shift without AVS. So even if have something that can handle 3DS, it will not matter without AVS happening.

Are you using TMS? 

The card scheme (e.g. Visa, Mastercard, etc.) liability shift rules do not currently depend on AVS. This might have been the case previously; each scheme's liability shift rules have changed substantially, multiple times (and with regional variations) since version 1 of 3DS.

Right now, a 3DS version 2 transaction that is "successfully completed through either frictionless or challenge flow" will result in a liability shift. This is true even if AVS is not enabled—and usually even if AVS is enabled and the customer fails the AVS challenge. Depending on the region, the transaction doesn't even need to pass through the frictionless or challenge flows for the liability shift to happen.

Adyen has some documentation here about Visa and Mastercard's conditions for the liability shift: 3D Secure for regulation compliance | Adyen Docs

That said, my reading of version 2.3.1.1 of the 3DS specification is that a card issuer can use the result of a customer's prior AVS challenge to help them decide whether to authorize a 3DS transaction. So it's theoretically possible that an issuer could decline a 3DS transaction based on failing AVS (normally a decision made by the payment processor), but this wouldn't affect the liability shift. 

The other interplay between 3DS and AVS is that, for members using Merchant Services, we can 3DS to reduce the impact of failed AVS checks. If there is a 3DS liability shift, we can reduce a transaction's risk score so that even if a customer gets their ZIP wrong, we can authorize the transaction. In this case, there's zero risk of a chargeback to the member organization (because of the liability shift) and the legitimate customer has their transaction authorized even though they made a typo or had a memory lapse. 

Thanks Nic.  I am still trying to wrap my head about 3DS v2.  Yes, what I stated was based on 3DS 1 rule set. 

Hey Jess,

We recently made our cutover to TMS from WorldPay. We did a token transfer because of our auto renew subscription program and sustained giving. We did our first pledge billing run last week and noticed a higher amount of declines than we would have gotten with WorldPay. We currently have AVS running in partial mode so it's supposed to only check the postal code. With that said, we have experienced that TMS is VERY particular about exact match. Also, we have learned that if the billing address on file is a PO Box, it will most likely fail as credit cards shouldn't have a PO Box as their primary mailing address.

We will be doing our first large invoice billing run in a couple weeks for our Broadway auto renew subscribers. This will be the first big test of TMS processing. In a conversation today, we are thinking about turning AVS off when we do that run to get as many cards to authorize as possible since these are trusted buyers. I'll let you know how that goes.

Chris

Hi Chris! I would love to hear how your first auto-billing run goes. We turned AVS on (we use Windcave) last week and did our first two rounds of auto-billing. For those, the zip code did not pass but the charges went through. Per our support ticket, this was expected behavior since we are using tokenized data. We are moving to Merchant Services in the late summer - I want to start planning now if we are going to have to make changes if the primary and billing zip codes don't match for our auto-billing patrons.
Best,
Jess

Hey Jess,

We ran our invoice billing utility today for our Broadway subs. We  rand 3219 accounts and had 470 fail. This was a minimal increase over last year. We left partial AVS on so we consider that a win.