Please ensure that your General Manager/ Finance Team reads this article. You may have payments declined if you do not take action further to this notice.
In recent months you may have heard about the changes being made to how online card payments are processed (e.g. via websites, also known as Ecommerce). These changes do not impact chip and pin payments.
As from 14th March 2022 all online payments must be compliant with the initial version of the 3D Secure standard (“3DSv1” for short), otherwise they will be declined by the card issuer1. However, the current 3DSv1 standard will soon be replaced by the ‘second generation’ of 3D Secure (“EMV 3DS” or “3DSv2”). This is a further regulatory change primarily designed to make online payments even more secure and further reduce the risk of fraud.
Although the 3DSv2 standard is not officially in force yet, our experience through our customers is that card issuers are already beginning to decline payments without 3DSv2 security, and we believe that it is likely that that these will be increasingly declined up to the end of September 2022.
If your property does not have a 3DSv2 compliant payment gateway from today, you will find online purchases will start to be declined with increasing frequency. It is important to note that you may not be aware of these declines as customers may just use another route to pay, such as an OTA or a phone call, or even book another hotel.
[1] Non-exempt cards only. Exempt cards, determined by Issuers or Acquirers (i.e. Low Value Transactions, Trusted beneficiaries or Recurring Transactions), are unaffected.
What do you need to do?
You should now make plans to ensure that you have a compliant gateway at the earliest possible opportunity, and in any event in place by September 2022.
In order to achieve this, you need to take one of the actions below:
Worldpay Online Gateway
If you are using a payment gateway supplied to you by WorldPay and integrated into a Guestline product (such as Rezlynx) then you will have a contract directly with Worldpay to receive gateway services.
As there are no definitive details from Worldpay on their solution for 3DSv2, and the clock is ticking down to the 3DSv2 deadline, we must now accept and therefore confirm that, as of today, there are no plans in place to integrate Guestline products to any new WorldPay gateway.
As such, this will leave your hotel unable to take any online payments from September 2022 through the Worldpay Online Gateway via Guestline.
You may wish to contact WorldPay for more information.
Alternative Gateway Options
To provide a fully 3DSv2 compliant solution Guestline products integrate with Trust Payments and GuestPay gateway solutions only. Our monitoring of real-world data shows that these are both showing significantly fewer declines than WorldPay since 14th March.
To guarantee you can continue to accept online payments with your Guestline solution you will need to move to one of these options:
Trust Payments
We have worked with Trust Payments for many years. You can reach them here: https://www.trustpayments.com/contact-us/
Guestline Gateway
Guestline itself provides an online gateway which is fully compliant with 3DSv2 requirements. This solution is not new; in fact, it is already being used in hundreds of hotels to process millions of pounds of transactions every day.
Please contact us at guestpay@guestline.com if you would like to discuss Guestline’s gateway solution.