India recurring payments

Learn how to update an integration to support RBI e-mandates.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) issued a directive (amended subsequently in December 2020 and March 2021) that introduces additional security measures for recurring payments on India issued cards. These measures include:

Banks need to register cardholders and create an e-mandate through a one-time process, using additional factor authentication (AFA) like 3D Secure (3DS).
Banks must alert cardholders at least 24 hours before charges take place and give them the ability to opt out of transactions.
Recurring transactions over 15,000 INR (or equivalent in other currencies) must go through AFA each time.

If you’re an India-based Stripe user or an international (non-IN) Stripe user, your business is impacted if you have customers who use India cards for:

Off-session payments
Subscriptions or Invoices where the collection_method is set to charge_automatically

How payments work with an e-mandate

Stripe has worked with a partner platform to support registering e-mandates and issuing pre-debit notifications to customers.

We don’t currently offer the use of e-mandates to Stripe users in Mexico and Japan.

Depending on how you’ve integrated with Stripe, you might need to send Stripe additional information to set up a mandate. The customer must go through AFA (3DS) to register the mandate.

Subsequent off-session payments or auto-debits for a Subscription undergo a significant change. Customers need to receive a pre-debit notification at least 24 hours before the actual payment with the exact debit amount mentioned. The pre-debit notification contains information about the payment and an option to cancel the mandate. If the payment amount is above 15,000 INR or the mandate’s maximum amount, the pre-debit notification contains a link to perform AFA (3DS) to authorize the payment.

Because Stripe is integrating with a partner platform, we wait 26 hours before charging the customer after receiving a payment request (we add a buffer for possible downstream issues, which necessitates the 26 hours advance notification). This means that Stripe delays collecting payment by 26 hours.

Without a mandate for an off-session payment, the card issuer will likely decline the payment.

Integration

Subscriptions

PaymentIntents & SetupIntents

The RBI regulations impact Subscriptions that use collection_method=charge_automatically to charge India issued cards.

Subscription creation

When creating a new Subscription with the API,

If you have a default payment method set, the Subscription uses the latest SetupIntent on the payment method, and attempts to find a corresponding mandate.
If no mandate is in place, Stripe automatically attempts to create one even if you don’t pass in the relevant parameters in mandate_options. The customer then needs to authenticate the payment.

To learn how to create a new Subscription, see Build a subscriptions integration.

Subscription Revenue Recovery

Stripe provides a number of automated recovery features to help collect payments that might’ve been unsuccessful. If you want to handle these payment failures on your own, refer to Build your own handling for recurring charge failures for guidance. Otherwise, some recommendations are listed below.

Payments from India issued cards are attempted only once. This behavior is independent of your payment retry settings.

3D Secure emails

If a mandate doesn’t exist on the default payment method during Subscription renewals or updates, Stripe attempts to create a new one. To register the mandate, the customer needs to complete AFA (3DS). Enable the Subscriptions and emails settings to Send a Stripe-hosted link for customers to confirm their payments when required so that customers can be brought back on-session to complete authentication if required.

Stripe doesn’t attempt to create a new mandate if the current mandate used by the Subscription is inactive.

Manage failed payments

We recommend enabling notifications to your customers if their Subscription payments fail and their Subscription is paused. Stripe can send emails to customers to update failed card payment methods if you enable it in the Subscriptions and emails settings.

Mandate webhooks

If you rely on Stripe to automatically create the mandate, the mandate details are returned in the Invoice’s underlying PaymentIntent and corresponding Charge, or the SetupIntent if you’re creating the Subscription with a trial.

Stripe doesn’t return a mandate ID if any of the following is true:

A card isn’t an India issued card.
The currency for the mandate isn’t supported by either the issuer or for the Stripe account’s country.
The India issued card is neither Visa nor Mastercard. Stripe only supports mandates for these two card brands.

Stripe supports INR mandates for all businesses. The following currencies are supported only for international (non-IN) businesses:

There are over 100 issuing banks in India and the process of fully adapting to the new requirements is expected to take some time. An issuer might not support e-mandates for a particular currency yet. If so, Stripe doesn’t return a mandate ID.

You can find the mandate_options in the PaymentIntent.

{
  "object": {
    "id": "pi_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
    "object": "payment_intent",
    ...
    "payment_method": "pm_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
    "payment_method_options": {
      "card": {
        "installments": null,
        "mandate_options": {
          "amount": 2000000,
          "amount_type": "maximum",
          "description": "{{DESCRIPTION}}",
          "end_date": null,
          "interval": "month",
          "interval_count": 1,
          "reference": "{{REFERENCE}}",
          "start_date": 1675238400,
          "supported_types": [
            "india"
          ]
        },
        ...
      }
    },
    ...
  }
}

The mandate ID is in the PaymentIntent’s corresponding Charge object. See Identifying charges on a PaymentIntent to learn more about how to retrieve the Charge.

{
  "id": "ch_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
  "object": "charge",
  "payment_intent": "pi_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
  "payment_method": "pm_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
  "payment_method_details": {
    "card": {
      "brand": "visa",
      "country": "IN",
      "mandate": "mandate_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx", // id of the mandate created
      ...
  },
  ...
  "status": "succeeded",
  ...
}

Even though the PaymentIntent or SetupIntent might have transitioned into status=succeeded, the mandate might not yet be active. Stripe creates the Mandate object in the pending state. When the mandate transitions to an active state, Stripe sends a mandate.updated event. In rare cases, a mandate can take up to 30 minutes to transition to active in live mode. If the mandate doesn’t become active after 30 minutes, assume that you can’t use the mandate.

{
  "object": {
    "id": "mandate_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
    "object": "mandate",
    "customer_acceptance": {
      "accepted_at": 1677301688,
      "online": {
        "ip_address": "xx.xxx.xx.xxx",
        "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/110.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
      },
      "type": "online"
    },
    "livemode": false,
    "multi_use": {
    },
    "payment_method": "pm_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
    "payment_method_details": {
      "card": {
      },
      "type": "card"
    },
    "status": "active",
    "type": "multi_use"
  },
  "previous_attributes": {
    "status": "pending"
  }
}

If Stripe can’t create a mandate, you can suggest using a different card, or you can offer alternative options such as setting collection_method as send_invoice for the Subscription instead. If the customer cancels the mandate during an off-session payment, the mandate becomes inactive and Stripe sends a mandate.updated event.

For more information on receiving webhooks, see Steps to receive webhooks.

Subscription updates

The pre-debit notification that the bank sends tells the cardholder, at minimum, about the name of the business, the transaction amount, the date or time of the debit, the reference number of the mandate, and the reason for debit. Make sure that your mandate details match what you’re actually debiting the customer for to avoid confusion or declines.

If you depend on Stripe to automatically create mandates for your Subscription and want to update a Subscription, we recommend that you bring the customer back on-session to cancel the original Subscription. Doing so creates a new subscription in the following scenarios, and creates a new mandate that reflects the Subscription details accurately:

Changes to the billing interval of a Subscription
Upgrades to a Subscription where the customer wants to avoid having to authorize the payment each renewal. For context, Stripe creates the mandate with amount_type=maximum by default. A customer can still be charged more than the maximum amount with amount_type=maximum. However, the customer must authorize payments for amounts more than the mandate_options[amount] or 15,000 INR (whichever is less).

Examples:

If you have amount_type=maximum , amount=100000, the customer would need to authenticate for amounts over 1,000 INR.
If you have amount=2000000, the customer would need to authenticate for amounts over 15,000 INR.

Pre-debit notification

When the off-session PaymentIntent is confirmed, the issuing bank sends the customer the pre-debit notification. The PaymentIntent transitions to a processing state for the entire duration of the pre-debit notification period (26 hours) and can’t be canceled.

{
  "object": "payment_intent",
  ...
  "processing": {
    "card": {
      "customer_notification": {
        "approval_requested": true,
        "completes_at": 1677307005
      }
    },
    "type": "card"
  },
  ...
  "status": "processing",
  ...
}

If processing.card.customer_notification.approval_requested is true, the customer needs to authenticate the payment using the pre-debit notification sent to them by the issuing bank.

The processing.card.customer_notification.completes_at attribute specifies the time that the Stripe attempts to charge the card. If successfully processing the payment requires customer approval, they need to authenticate the payment by the specified time.

Decline codes

Note the decline codes that can occur in the following scenarios:

Decline code	Description
india_recurring_payment_mandate_canceled	This decline code is shown when a payment is attempted using a canceled mandate
transaction_not_approved	This decline code is shown when a payment is attempted and the customer has paused permissions to auto-debit, or doesn’t authenticate the payment when it’s required.

Testing

You can use these test card numbers to simulate different scenarios.

In test mode, it takes approximately 15 minutes for the PaymentIntent to transition out of the processing state.

Stripe no longer supports 3D Secure 1, except for IN Stripe accounts. If you have a non-IN account, use the 3D Secure 2 test cards. If a non-IN business uses a 3D Secure 1 test card, a mandate isn’t created.

Test card number	Scenario
	Simulates successful mandate setup and renewals.
	Simulates a cardholder receiving a pre-debit notification for an off-session payment and either canceling or pausing the payment for a mandate of any amount.
	Simulates the issuing bank’s failure to send a pre-debit notification to the cardholder for an off-session payment for a mandate of any amount.
	Simulates a cardholder canceling a mandate of any amount.

Limitations

Keep in mind the following limitations:

Stripe attempts to automatically create mandates only on Subscriptions created after October 1, 2021. If you have a Subscription created before then, cancel and create a new Subscription to make sure a mandate is created.
You can’t create a mandate using the Charges and Sources APIs. If you want to create a mandate, you must use the PaymentIntent or SetupIntent APIs.
You can’t pass an existing mandate to a Subscription.
You can’t cancel or update a mandate.