Handling end-payer notifications

Intro

There are a large number of potential notifications that can be sent to both your users (e.g. business collecting payments) and their end customers (e.g. the payer) to satisfy scheme requirements.

In reality, the vast majority of the notifications issued by GoCardless are for two events;

1. Mandate Setup Confirmation - sent to an end customer when they set up a mandate with your user 
2. Advance Payment Notification - sent to an end customer in advance of a payment being taken against an active mandate
3. Subscription Creation Notification - sent to an end customer when a subscription is set up for them

Previous approach

Previously as a Partner, you had no ability to control notifications listed above. Instead, GoCardless controlled and sent all notifications.

Partners could, of course, send their own notifications too, but these would be in addition to the GoCardless generated versions.

For partners using our Subscriptions endpoint (and GoCardless subscription logic), GoCardless would generate a Mandate Setup and Subscription Creation Notification at the start to cover the whole subscription. No further Advance Payment Notifications would be sent unless the collection amount or the charge date changed.

For partners using our Payments endpoint (and their own subscription logic), GoCardless would send an Advance Payment Notification in advance of every single payment. The reason for this is because our API has no way of knowing that a string of separate one-off payment requests are part of a wider subscription and therefore a notification is generated each time (to satisfy compliance requirements).

Our Solution and the benefit

Partners are now able to control the Mandate Setup Confirmation, the Advance Payment Notification and the Subscription Creation Notification.

Handling these notifications allows you to create a more seamless and branded process for your users and their end customers. For example;

• You can combine your welcome emails with Mandate Setup Confirmation notifications
• If using the Payments endpoint, you can send one notification detailing the schedule of all upcoming payments to an end customer, rather than having GoCardless generate an Advance Payment Notification each time a payment is created

How it works & Supported schemes

You can read more about how to develop and implement this feature in our Partner Developer Documentation here.

Notifications can be handled in all GoCardless schemes.

Getting approved to handle notifications

In order to handle customer notifications, your Partner App will need to be enabled for this by the GoCardless team. To start the process of getting enabled, get in touch with our support team (help@gocardless.com).

If you would like to test the functionality on your sandbox account, please provide us with:

• The email address and App ID of your sandbox account
• Which notification types you'd like to test
• Which scheme(s) you'd like to test

If you would like to have the functionality enabled for your live account, please provide us with:

• The email address and App ID of your live account
• Which notification types you'd like to be enabled for
• Which scheme(s) you'd like to handle notifications for
• An example of the notification you'd send for each notification type and scheme combination that you'd like to be enabled for. Requirements for these can be seen here.
• We will then review your notification templates and let you know if any changes are needed before enabling the functionality on your account.