Account Updater is a service offered by card schemes that automatically updates outdated card details. Without Account Updater, when a consumer's card expires, you receive a rejection notification and must contact the consumer to request their new expiry date. This results in failed transactions and payment delays.

With Account Updater, card details are updated without manual intervention. We query the card networks—Visa's Account Updater and Mastercard's Automatic Billing Updater—either immediately or prior to a transaction. Your payments are processed with current card details, which reduces failed transactions caused by expired credentials and eliminates the need to contact consumers for updated information.

The account updater service provides updates on the following cases:  

• Expired card
• Change in card number/PAN
• Account closures
• Cancelled, lost or stolen card

We support Account Updater for both Visa and Mastercard credit and debit cards. You can enable it in two ways, both requiring no additional integration:

• Subscribed updates via Tokenization Service: After integrating the Worldline Tokenization Service, you can subscribe to Account Updater. We regularly monitor your tokens against predefined criteria and send update requests to the card schemes. When updates are available, we update the tokens automatically—no action is required from you. You receive a webhook notification confirming the token was updated.
• Real-time account updates: We check for card updates at the moment of payment processing. If a payment is declined due to an outdated card, we immediately send an update request to the card scheme. Using the updated details received, we retry the payment without any intervention from you. The updated card information is returned synchronously in the payment response. If you're using Worldline Tokenization Service, the token is updated automatically.

Key Benefits

• Real-time and batch solution - two-sided approach to capture the revenue that batch processes miss.
• No dependency on the consumer to keep card data up-to-date.
• Automatically updated payment card details when changed, resulting in an increased payment acceptance rate.
• If you use Worldline Tokenization Service, the token storing the card details is automatically updated.

Flowchart

Steps: 

1. You submit the Account Updater batch file to the directory that has been set-up, including all the encrypted card details that you would like to be updated.
2. You will receive an Acknowledgement file from us with a confirmation of any rejected records.
3. Our system will process the data from your input file and include these in the Account Updater request to our Account Updater Provider.
4. The Account Updater Provider will submit the transaction details to the Card Schemes.
5. The Card Schemes will provide the updated account details including the reason for change and deliver the response file.
6. The Account Updater Provider will provide us with the updated information in a response file and we will update the records in our system with the updated information.
7. We create the response file including the updated account details and the reason for change and upload this to your directory. You can use these details to update the records in your system and use it for processing new transactions.

Types of account updates

Account updates from card schemes can result in the following response types: