Value-Added Services Overview
Description
What's in this article?
Token Management, Recurring Billing and Account Updater are complementary value-added services that are compatible with our hardware solutions, our Virtual Terminal solution, and our e-commerce solution, the Bank of America Gateway. Token Management is available within all Merchant Services accounts; however enrollment in Recurring Billing and Account Updater must be completed directly with your Merchant Consultant. These services incur fees. These services may be accessed and managed from within your Merchant Services account in online banking or, if integrating using the Bank of America Gateway using the Card Not Present Toolkit, managed via API.
This article explains how token-based Value-Added Services work together and refers to other articles/user guides that are specific to each service. Advanced e-commerce merchants using our Card Not Present Integration Toolkit, and planning to utilize these services via API, can reference associated developer guides.
- Token Management
- Recurring Billing
- Account Updater
Customer tokens allow merchants with repeat customers to create tokenized profiles for their clients to securely store client information for customer management purposes or easy repeat billing. A token profile includes two tokens: the customer token to store information about the customer and the billing token to store information about the payment method. A customer token can have multiple billing tokens associated with it.
- A customer token saves a customer’s name, shipping and billing address, contact information, and any custom fields collected by the merchant.
- A customer token automatically creates a billing token. A billing token securely stores a card’s attributes, like card number and expiration date. A single customer token can be associated to multiple billing tokens if desired. The functionality provided by customer tokens and billing tokens is commonly referred to as allowing merchants to keep “cards on file.”
Tokens are created and managed through Token Management in your Merchant Services account in Business Advantage 360 online banking. All Merchant Services accounts include the Token Management option. Enrollment for this service is not required. Creating or updating a customer or billing token will incur a fee, as noted on the order confirmation email.
Recurring Billing is a value-added service that allows you to build payment plans based on your business model or product offerings and associate those payment plans to subscriptions for recurring payments from your customers. You can create Recurring Billing plans within your Merchant Services account – setting the frequency, the amount, and the billing date. Your end users sign up with with you directly for a subscription and you use a customer token to assign the customer to the appropriate Recurring Billing plan(s). You can then automatically process recurring payments from your end users without storing any sensitive customer or payment information.
Success of card-on-file and recurring billing programs depends upon the validity of your payment information you have on file for your customer: your Billing Tokens. Billing Tokens can declined at the time of checkout or billing if the underlying card information has expired or changed. Account Updater helps you keep Billing Tokens up to date, so that you can improve authorization success rates by identifying invalid cards.
In this way, when a customer has provided you their card information to “keep on file,” or has registered for a subscription or a payment plan, Account Updater can help you provide them an effortless checkout and billing experience for future transactions, by automatically updating their card if their card number or expiration date changes. The customer does not have to remember to contact you and provide you this information. Account Updater helps your business reduce failed transactions, and can thereby reduce customer frustration.
If you manage your Account Updater service through your Merchant Services account in online banking you will use the Token Harvest method to update your cards on file. Token Harvest will automatically update expired Billing Tokens monthly, on the harvest date that you’ve selected. It will also provide you a downloadable report of accounts that have been closed entirely.
You can refer to Account Updater FAQs or to the Account Updater User Guide, for more information on how to use and manage your Account Updater service.