We now have multiple accounts for video streaming and services such as Uber. This means we provide payment information to a wide variety of online service providers for long term, regular payments – rather than just purchases. With the popularity of Netflix, iTunes, Uber and Airbnb on the rise, most of us are now used to providing our card information to a number of brands. Those companies then keep our card data on file. In some markets, subscription services can be managed by an automated withdrawal from an IBAN provided by the consumer or other payment services such as PayPal. Still, using a payment card is now considered the more conventional payment method for most digital accounts worldwide. It is fair to say that most of us have registered our card information with multiple service providers and, as a result, many of us today would struggle to pull together a complete list of those brands holding our details.
The bottom line is that, in the past, we have all provided our cards to brands but often can’t remember or stay in control of which cards we’ve used and where. Sounds like a very casual approach to a very serious (i.e. payments) matter, doesn’t it?
This increasingly frequent habit comes with many risks for our card security. So-called card not present (CNP) transactions are exposed to a fraud rate five to 10 times higher than card present (CP) transactions. On top of the security issues, there is one hurdle that we all rarely pay attention to when we first register our cards: our account information is not automatically updated when our physical card is replaced.
For example, this can lead to a customer journey we absolutely want to avoid: Julie registered to a photo album website two years ago using a payment card she had at that time, with a three-year validity. At the same time she registered her card information, Julie also signed up to a web mail client that she no longer uses today.
When her payment card was about to expire, the website sent multiple email notices via her registered web mail to warn Julie about her card expiration, asking for the renewed card information and warning Julie about her account deletion if she failed to provide up-to-date payment details within a certain timeframe.
Of course, Julie missed all those emails as she no longer uses that email address, nor did she pay attention to her card expiry date – as many of us don’t. If the worst comes to the worst, after missing multiple notices, her account is suspended, then deleted and all her photos are gone.
This is just one use case, but it could equally apply in other circumstances; such as the suspension of a mobile phone line or the expiry of a great TV package. Account deletion is a fundamentally bad customer journey, and even if it occurs pretty rarely, there is still a poor user experience that most service providers will be happy to fix from fear of losing associated recurring revenue.
EMV Tokenization is a solution that removes the need for the end user to worry about card renewal. The merchant-bound token used for payment maps to the physical payment card and the payment network’s tokenization platform automatically updates this link.
Issuing banks and processors embracing this Tokenization method also provide a push-provisioning solution to their cardholders: end users can directly assign their digital cards to service providers, right from their mobile banking app.
This new Digital Payment feature, which is available to digital service providers and online retailers at large, also removes the burden of web fill forms that are a constraint for end-users.
Your subscription should be forever and worry-free. The EMV Tokenization offer for Digital Commerce brings this benefit and convenience to end-users. It is also valuable for eMerchants who do not want any friction or unpleasant surprises for their customers. That is a win-win between online service providers and their customers.
Download the whitepaper: Tackling involuntary churn in the subscription economy with EMV tokenization
