What do you think caused 5.5 million people in Britain to cancel their credit cards last year? If you guessed fraud, you’d be right. Those 5.5 million people comprise a full 12% of the population—one million higher than last year and evidence that cybercrime has gotten worse in that country and people are taking action to protect themselves.

Fraud is just one reason for someone to cancel a credit card. Cards get lost, people change banks, or they simply sign up for a card with better rates. Whatever the reason, for a business that relies on recurring revenue, credit card declines have a different impact: reduced revenue and increased churn.

Of course, some number of declines are unavoidable, but many, if identified ahead of time, can be repaired before the transaction is rejected. For example, a new expiration date or credit card security code (called a CVV or CCV code) are common reason for transaction declines, especially with the roll-out last year of new EMV cards.

Recurly’s Account Updater Service

A straightforward way to address these types of avoidable declines is via the Account Updater service provided by your payment gateway. You can also use the free, automated Account Updater service provided by Recurly to all of our merchants. Recurly’s Account Updater service is critical to minimizing revenue losses due to avoidable failed payments.

If you’re a Recurly customer, the single most important thing you can do to decrease avoidable credit card declines is to enable Recurly’s free Account Updater service right now!

This service monitors your customers’ Mastercard and Visa credit cards for changes and then makes updates in Recurly’s records, ensuring that the payment will go through. If the update can’t be made automatically, our Account Updater will alert you to the issue so you can address it with your customer directly.  

Account Updater will also check a card’s status a few days before a subscription is set to renew. If changes are needed and can be made automatically, the service makes them, helping to ensure that the renewal transaction goes through smoothly.

Recovering More Revenue

So you understand exactly how much revenue Recurly “recovers” for you, we display the amount on your invoice. Oftentimes, this number is larger than the amount due on the invoice!  

Recovered revenue invoice

Account Updater is available free of charge for every payment gateway that Recurly supports (with the exception of Opayo).

How to Enable Account Updater

To enable Account Updater for your site, simply go to your Payment Gateways page and click  the "Enable" button under the Account Updater section shown on the right-hand side. Please note that your site must be in production mode in order to use Account Updater.

Recurly’s Account Updater service is another way that we put smart technology to work on your behalf.