Understand RBI Rules for Recurring Card Payments and e-mandates

Understand how the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) recurring payment regulations affect subscription billing and card-based transactions for customers using Indian-issued debit or credit cards. These guidelines introduce e-mandates, additional authentication requirements, and advance transaction notifications that merchants must support to ensure recurring payments continue processing successfully.

What are e-mandates?

An e-mandate is a digital payment service, initiated by RBI, for customers to virtually authorize merchants to collect recurring payments using debit cards or credit cards.

RBI's guidelines

• To make it easier for card holders, RBI has mandated Additional Factor Authentication (AFA) for registration and first transaction of recurring subscriptions / transactions.
• RBI requires banks to provide notice at least 24 hours prior to the recurring transaction being processed, as well as written notice after the transaction is successfully processed.
• AFA is mandatory only for transactions that exceed INR 5000 (increased from the previous INR 2000 threshold).
• Banks must allow the cardholder to withdraw an e-mandate at any point in time and immediately stop all recurring payments.
• An e-mandate creation or modification must be supplied free of charge.

We recommend reviewing RBI's notifications for the latest updates.

Risks of non-compliance

If these guidelines are not followed, recurring payments from a card issued in India fail. Customers are instead required to make one-time payments, completing the mandate process each time.

Your next steps

Communicate the changes with your customers and ensure they are aware of the need to come back online to set up a new mandate to continue their recurring payment without AFA.

• Customers must be encouraged to use the Self-Service Page to proactively set up new e-mandates for their recurring payments.
• Send notifications to your customers about the new AFA process using custom email fields (see Basic fields).
• Share an invoice's public-facing URL (see Invoice (only for invoice emails)) along with dunning emails (see Set Dunning Email From Address and BCC) to help with failed payments.

The following changes may apply based on the Stripe integration with Advanced Billing:

• If you use Advanced Billing's Hosted Pages, required updates are made at the backend to minimize any impact for you as a merchant.
• If you use Custom Checkout with Maxio.js (formerly Chargify.js), most updates are made at the backend to minimize any impact, but you need to make a minor update to your integration. See Create a Payment Profile for the recommended integration steps.
• If you use the Billing Portal, required updates are made at the backend to minimize any impact for you as a merchant.
• If you use the Self-Service Page, required updates are made at the backend to minimize any impact for you as a merchant.

Braintree is only supported for Relationship Invoicing pay-invoice-online payment paths, not for statement-based sites.

Additional resources

If you'd like to learn more about RBI's updates or how to manage these changes within Advanced Billing, see the following resources.

• For an overview of how Advanced Billing handles 3D Secure payments, see Understand PSD2, SCA, and 3DS.
• For important updates to RBI regulations on recurring card payments in India, see Stripe's documentation.
• For background on the India recurring-payments rule, see TechCrunch's coverage.