The Reserve Bank of India has issued a new directive with regards to online payments. The full notification on the RBI website is rather technical. You may have gotten an email from Stripe about RBI regulations or from another payment gateway you use.
This article aims to explain the new regulation. First and foremost, know that users on the latest version of Paid Memberships Pro using the Stripe, PayPal Express, or PayPal Standard gateways are already compliant.
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About the New RBI Regulations
The basic idea is that Indian credit cards will require extra authentication for recurring payments. This authentication is similar to the Strong Customer Authentication or 3-D Secure Authentication that came out of European regulations a few years ago.
If your checkout is set up to support SCA and RBI regulations, then you won’t notice anything as a site owner. Just some percentage of your customers will be prompted for a second authentication step (usually a text message, email, or 2FA code) at checkout. If your checkout is not set up to support SCA or RBI regulations, then some percentage of your customers using credit cards from Europe or India will have their cards declined.
Whether your site is ready depends on if your gateway of choice is ready and if we at PMPro have updated our integration to work with the new gateway updates.
Stripe Users Are Ready
The updates Stripe made to support SCA also supports the RBI updates. The PMPro integration with Stripe also supports these updates. Users of the latest version of PMPro are good to go.
PayPal Standard and PayPal Express Users Are Ready
Both PayPal Standard and PayPal Express are “offsite” gateways which process the full transaction on the PayPal site. PayPal is updated to support both SCA and RBI regulations. Users of the latest version of PMPro are good to go.
PayPal Website Payments Pro (Legacy) Users Are Partially Ready
PayPal has been updated to support SCA and RBI regulations, but the legacy Website Payments Pro integration for PMPro has not been updated to utilize those features when checking out with a credit card on site. The PayPal Express integration will still work, and we recommend suggesting European and Indian customers use that option at checkout.
Payflow Pro Users Are Not Ready
Payflow Pro has been updated to support 3-D Secure authentication, but our PMPro integration with Payflow does not utilize this yet. We do not have an ETA for when that support will be ready. In the meantime, if you expect to have a large number of European or Indian customers, you should look into offering a secondary payment method for those customers.
Authorize.net Users Are Not Ready
As far as we know, Authorize.net does not support SCA or RBI regulations. We recommend switching to a modern gateway like Stripe.
Braintree Payments Users Are Not Ready
Braintree has been updated to support SCA and RBI regulations, but our PMPro integration with Braintree does not utilize this yet. We do not have an ETA for when that support will be ready. In the meantime, if you expect to have a large number of European or Indian customers, you should look into offering a secondary payment method for those customers.
Further Questions?
If you have further questions about this, we recommend reaching out to your gateway or to us at PMPro on our contact form here. Thanks.
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