Verified Mandates
Please note: The Verified Mandates tool is only available to verify payers for the following bank debit schemes: Bacs in the UK, ACH in the US, Autogiro in Sweden, and SEPA in Germany and France.
If you use Billing Request Flows, you can choose to implement Verified Mandates on its own or combined with the rest of our anti-fraud solution, GoCardless Protect+. If you use Redirect Flows, you can only use Verified Mandates as a part of GoCardless Protect+.
Both GoCardless Protect+ and Verified Mandates are available only to approved integrators. If you are interested in either GoCardless Protect+ or Verified Mandates, please get in touch with your account manager.
As businesses report losing up to 2.2% of annual revenue due to fraud, fraud prevention has become an essential part of protecting a business' bottom line. But when you’re onboarding potentially thousands of new customers every day, how do you verify new signups while offering customers an uninterrupted checkout experience?
With GoCardless, you can now check whether a new customer’s bank account details are genuine without compromising the customer experience. Here's how it works:
Verified Mandates is a fraud prevention tool that gives you the peace of mind that your customers are who they say they are. When setting up a new mandate, we’ll help them automatically log into their online banking to confirm their information. If everything checks out, your customers are verified and you can confirm their verification status on the dashboard. You can see an example of what this looks like for your customers here.
Getting set-up to use Verified Mandates
Please note: Verified Mandates is currently available to verify payers for the following schemes: Bacs in the UK, ACH in the US, Autogiro in Sweden, and SEPA in Germany and France.
Here is a full list of supported Bank Debit schemes and whether a verification mechanism is available:
| Scheme | API | Available | Required by scheme to verify every customer |
|---|---|---|---|
|
ACH |
ach |
Yes |
No |
|
Autogiro |
autogiro |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Bacs |
bacs |
Yes |
No |
|
Becs |
becs |
No |
- |
|
Becs NZ |
becs_nz |
No |
- |
|
Betalingsservice |
betalingsservice |
No |
- |
|
PAD |
pad |
No |
- |
|
SEPA Core |
sepa_core |
Yes (Germany and France only) |
No |
If you use GoCardless on an Advanced or Pro plan, you will have Verified Mandates enabled by default and can begin using it in your live environment.
To test Verified Mandates in our sandbox environment, you can sign up here for a sandbox account. The feature is automatically enabled for all sandbox accounts.
Implementing Verified Mandates
If the Verified Mandates feature is enabled for your account, you can start creating Verified Mandates via the Billing Requests API. You will need to set the verify attribute to your preferred level of verification as described here.
Whether or not a mandate will be verified depends on the verify level selected.There are four verify levels for the Billing Request:
-
minimum: Bank account verification will be used only if absolutely required, such as when part of scheme rules.
-
when_available: Bank account verification will be used if it’s available for the scheme. If not available, the request will proceed without verifying the bank account.
-
always: Bank account verification will be used if it’s available for the scheme. If not available, the request will fail.
-
recommended: Bank account verification will be used if 1) it’s part of scheme rules and 2) if our anti-fraud product, GoCardless Protect+ is also enabled, it will decide using our payment intelligence solution when a bank account should be verified. This means GoCardless Protect+ will only put riskier payers through a Verified Mandate (our recommended flow). If GoCardless Protect+ is not enabled, “recommended” will behave the same as the “minimum” option.
Please note: By default, all Billing Requests will use recommended.
If using recommended when the GoCardless Protect+ feature is not enabled, it will behave the same as the minimum option.
If you have GoCardless Protect+ enabled, you can also create Verified Mandates via Redirect Flows. Note that you cannot specify the verify attribute for Redirect Flows. They will automatically only use the “recommended” verify level.
Please note: The detect engine within our anti-fraud product, GoCardless Protect+, is a separate feature from Verified Mandates.This is a payment intelligence solution that GoCardless will use to determine if a payer may be fraudulent.
GoCardless Protect+ will be available for approved integrators only.
When GoCardless Protect+ is enabled, the recommended option will be able to intelligently decide when a bank account should be verified, based on the response from this payment intelligence solution. If you are interested in using GoCardless Protect+, please get in touch with your account manager.
Please see here for code samples on implementing Verified Mandates with the Billing Requests API.
Please contact api@gocardless.com if you require assistance with the API.