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Paysafe SEPA Direct Debit setup

This document covers the setup of Direct Debits with SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) using the Paysafe payment gateway.

Overview

In addition to allowing your supporters to donate using their credit or debit card, you can also allow them to set up regular payments directly from their bank account using SEPA direct debit. The Single Euro Payments Area is an initiative that covers a number of EU member states, as well as some non-member territories. 

Before you begin, we strongly recommend that you explicitly confirm the payment methods and currencies available to you with Paysafe.

As the currency will be fixed with the AccountID of your Paysafe gateway setup, it will not be necessary to include a currency form field on your donation pages. We only support recurring (regular) payments for Direct Debit, and you will still need to include the ‘Recurring payment’ field as a hidden field on the page, with a fixed value of ‘Y’. 

Before setting up

Before creating donation pages using the Paysafe gateway you will need to have arranged your merchant account with Paysafe. You will also need to decide what base URL you would like to use for your donation pages, and ensure that a certificate exists for it on our load balancer.

Setting up the gateway

It is recommended that you create and keep two separate gateway records in your account, one to be used for testing and one linked to your live gateway. Donation pages should be linked to a test gateway initially, and then switched to a live gateway before launch. To create each one:

  1. Click on Hello YOURNAME , then select Account settings > Gateways in the pop-up menu.
  2. Click New Payment Gateway to create a new entry
  3. The fields are set up as follows:

Field

Description

Reference name

A unique name for the gateway. It is a good idea for the name to include the type of gateway (eg. Paysafe), the currency, and whether it is a live or test gateway.

Select gateway

Select the Paysafe gateway

Username

Your Paysafe account user name.

API key

Paysafe will provide this, along with your Account ID. You will typically have one Account ID for each of the currency you have enabled in your Paysafe account.

Account ID

See above.

Currency

Select the appropriate currency for the gateway, subject to what you have agreed with Paysafe. Note that changing this field in Engaging Networks will only change how currency is reported in our platform. The actual currency of the donations is determined by the currency of your Paysafe account (Account ID).

Test mode

Should be checked for a test gateway, but must be unchecked for a gateway that will accept live donations.

Form Fields

The following fields should be set up in the default supporter record with the appropriate field ‘tag’ and added to your donation form.

Standard fields – required for every Paysafe donation page

Form Field

Mandatory/optional

Value type

Comments

Email Address

Mandatory

Alphanumeric

Supporter’s email address

First Name

Mandatory

 

Alpha

The supporter’s first name.

Last Name

Mandatory

Alpha

The supporter’s last name.

 

Address 1

Mandatory

 

Alphanumeric

The first line of the supporter’s address

City

Mandatory

 

Alpha

The address city of the supporter

Region

Mandatory

 

Alpha

The address region of the supporter, you can provide a drop down list of counties or allow the donor to enter this themselves.

Postcode

Mandatory

 

Alphanumeric

The donors postcode.

Country

Mandatory

Alpha

The country of the cardholder. This should be a 2 character code for the country. For UK Direct Debits use GB as the code. As the BACS donation page is UK only, this field can be hidden on the page.

Donation Amount

Mandatory

 

Numeric

May be entered as a whole number, or with two decimal places. Eg. Twelve pounds may be entered as ’12’ or ‘12.00’. You may want to consider using the ‘select with input’ or ‘radio with input’ field types ‚Äì see below.

Fields required for Direct Debits

For Direct Debit payments you will also need to collect the following details:

Form Field

Mandatory/optional

Value type

Comments

Payment Type

Mandatory

Alpha

SEPA

Bank Account Type

Mandatory

Alpha

CHECKING, SAVINGS or LOAN

This can be hidden on the page. For most accounts, you can use CHECKING.

Credit Card Holder Name

Mandatory

Alpha

The full name of the bank account holder.

Bank Account Number

Mandatory

Alphanumeric

The IBAN (International Bank Account Number) account number to be used for making the payment. 

Bank Routing Number

Mandatory

Alphanumeric

The BIC (bank identifier code) associated with the bank account number. 

Recurring Payment

Mandatory

Alpha

Y

We currently only allow recurring payments for Direct Debit.

Recurring Frequency

Optional

Alpha

Permitted values are: MONTHLY, QUARTERLY, SEMI_ANNUAL and ANNUAL. If the field is not submitted, the default will be MONTHLY.

Recurring Day

Optional

Numeric

The day of the month on which the recurring payment should be taken, from 1-28. If the field is not submitted, the default recurring payment day will be taken from the “day” of the Recurring Start Date.

To ensure that users provide correct input, consider using validators on the form fields whenever possible. There are several built in validator types which can be created to deal with standard Alphanumeric data or donation amounts, but you can also create custom validators using regular expressions. When dealing with payment gateways pay particular attention to input that could cause problems. For Paysafe, the following overview is a list of characters which should never be part of any data submitted as part of the Direct Debit setup, as it will result in an error:

Character HEX Description
22 Double quotes (or speech marks)
; 3B Semicolon
^ 5E Caret, circumflex
* 2A Asterisk
< 3C Less than (or open angled bracket)
/ 2F Slash or divide
[ 5B Opening bracket
] 5D Closing bracket
\ 5C

Backslash

Updated on December 6, 2019

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