SCA (Strong Customer Authentication) Payment Readiness with Stripe

Heights Platform's checkout fully supports SCA for payments from your students. Full enforcement of Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) under European regulation began on Dec 31, 2020.

If you collect card payments from European customers through Stripe, these customers will likely be required to complete an authorization step with their bank during the checkout process. After a student enters their card info and clicks on your purchase button, this authentication will appear as a popup from the student's bank automatically if required. Students may have to authenticate both one-time and subscription payments. In most cases, a student only needs to authenticate the start of a subscription they purchase from you, and future payments will happen automatically as with any other subscription customer you have in Heights. 

Some customers may need to authenticate subsequent payments for subscriptions. To make this easier for you and your students, Stripe provides a setting that will email your student a link to authenticate when required, ensuring that there is no interruption in their subscription. 

To fully take advantage of this, we recommend turning on 3D Secure customer emails inside Stripe. Stripe recommends that you have 3D secure emails enabled if you expect to process cards that may require authentication in order to make payments. Heights Platform and other websites are not able to automatically turn this on for you. Having this feature checked off will ensure that Heights is able to handle every case of card authentication requirement for you.

You can check that you have this setting active by going to this page of your billing settings in your Stripe account: https://dashboard.stripe.com/settings/billing/automatic

Scrolling down on the page and check the following settings are enabled, then click save: