Recurring payments

Why recurring revenue depends on payment success

Subscription businesses rarely lose customers to cancellation alone - they lose them to failed payments. Industry reporting suggests roughly one in ten subscription card payments fails on first attempt, and most of those failures are recoverable: a temporary limit, a daily cap, a timing issue. Every failure your billing cannot recover is involuntary churn - a customer who never chose to leave. Recurring payments done properly are therefore a revenue-protection system, not just a convenience, and that is how LekkaPay builds them: correct credential storage, correctly flagged billing, and recovery when payments fail.

Is storing card details safe?

Safe for the customer, and - just as important - safe for you. When a customer saves their card, the details go into LekkaPay's vault, a PCI-isolated environment operated by a PCI DSS Level 1 compliant service provider. Your systems receive only a token: a reference that can trigger billing through LekkaPay and does nothing anywhere else. That isolation keeps real card numbers out of your databases, your logs and your backups, which shrinks both your breach exposure and your PCI compliance burden. How the vault works in detail is covered on our tokenisation page.

What happens when a payment fails?

A decline on a subscription payment is usually the start of a recovery process, not the end of a customer. LekkaPay gives you configurable retries: you set how many attempts to make and when, because a payday-aligned retry schedule suits an insurance book differently from a streaming service. Alongside retries, network tokenisation keeps saved cards current on its own: when a card is reissued or expires, the network token updates automatically, so renewals that would have failed on stale card details simply go through - live today via Visa Token Service and Mastercard Checkout Solutions. Where a card still needs the customer's attention, the vault tracks expiry dates so you can prompt them before the renewal that would have failed - fixing the problem while it is still invisible. Everything is reported per attempt, so your finance team sees exactly what was recovered and how.

What can you bill on a schedule?

Anything with a repeating shape. Fixed subscriptions and memberships are the obvious cases, but the same tokenised card-on-file machinery runs instalment plans, usage-based billing where the amount varies each cycle, and top-ups triggered when a balance runs low. Each charge is a merchant-initiated transaction - a payment you initiate from the stored token without the customer present, flagged to issuing banks exactly as scheme rules require, which protects your approval rates cycle after cycle.