Best way to handle 3-D Secure on subscription renewals?
Posted by dan_b — April 12, 2026 — 14 replies
We're running monthly subscriptions and seeing a chunk of renewals fail because issuers are challenging them with 3DS. The customer isn't actively in the flow — they're not in front of the app — so the challenge times out and the charge declines. Anyone solved this elegantly?
The pattern that works: collect the card with setup_future_usage: off_session on the initial Checkout session. That stores the SCA challenge result as a mandate, and on subsequent charges Evolve presents the mandate to the issuer instead of triggering a fresh challenge. Most EU/UK issuers accept the mandate as proof of customer agreement under PSD2's MIT exemption. We see challenge rates drop from ~12% to under 1% after this flip. Doc reference: Identity verification flows / Saved payment methods.
That fixed it. Combined with retry-on-soft-decline our renewal success rate went from 91% to 97.4%. Thanks Maria.