New credit card rules in India: recurring card payments to be affected | Hacker News Reader

New credit card rules in India: recurring card payments to be affected

economictimes.indiatimes.com

223 pointsBrajeshwar151 comments

Services handling recurring payments need to compulsorily have a cancel button.

Here's my story with nytimes today. There's no cancellation button in the app or the website. There's a "chat with agent"option, but it doesn't work. So they ask you to call an agent, on the phone.

After ten minutes of being "next in line", I get to speak to someone. He doesn't let me cancel, but takes down my details and transfers to "Management".

I was seventh in line. But after 10 mins, I was eighth in line. After 12 mins, I was ninth in line. I was finally able to get hold of someone and cancel it, after holding for 25 minutes.

This should be illegal.

Boston Globe and telecom providers in the states do the same thing - force you to talk with someone (I think the term is "retention specialist"). Naturally after having introductory rates expire and prices jacked up 50% or more you're angry and want to get out, but they have all kinds of new promotions or rates you can sign onto.

I've never been willing to try a subscription with them due to stories like this. It actually taught me to do a quick search on how to cancel something before I subscribe. If I have to talk to someone I'm probably not ever going to subscribe.

In particular - services should never be asymetrical in barriers to subscribe vs. unsubscribe - that's clearly a predatory tactic that exists to trap a portion of users as unwilling subscribers. I will never support a company that operates in that manner - no matter how little or much I appreciate their services.

This reminds me of my story with LA fitness. They closed down their only location that’s in a sane driving distance to me and said I could use my membership at the next closest location without paying extra, as if they were doing me a favor. After calling them to cancel, they refused to cancel on the phone and insisted I go into a physical location… well, it’s 30 miles away, and I didn’t have a car and I’m on crutches. Getting around was very difficult for me.

In the meantime, they refused to even accept my phone call as a request to cancel. I was charged for three extra months, until I finally paid $100+ round trip to Uber to their location and cancel in person.

LA Fitness is a soulless leech, and the fact that company is allowed to stay in business is testament to a corrupt government system.

Sounds like an episode of Friends from the 90's

I WANNA QUIT THE GYM!

I WANNA QUIT THE BANK!

Sounds like a credit card chargeback to me.

I've never been to LA Fitness, but I know Planet Fitness requires you to provide a voided check, and they directly withdraw from your bank account.

Planet Fitness requires you to visit one of their branches to cancel or write a letter to the branch where you enrolled. I cancelled my membership last week.

That's what I did with 24 Hour Fitness. I had to cancel in person, which is ridiculous, but the guy told me that because of the way their system works, they will charge me for the next month too. When the charges showed up a month later, I use chargeback to refund the money and that was the end of it. Their system supposedly being slow to process isn't a reason for me to be charged another month; one shouldn't be rewarded for incompetence. I was ready to fight them on it because nowhere in the agreement did they mention charging me another month after cancelation but they let the chargeback stay -- probably because they know it's baseless and was hoping people won't bother fighting them.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if credit card companies essentially screen calls from some gyms. I can't imagine you're the first person to have a terrible experience with 24 Hr Fitness. I don't know if it'd go so far as to effect their credit score, but I imagine businesses like that are flagged in processing systems.

They will submit the debt to a debt collector and ding your credit if this is done. The debt is governed by the contract you signed, not by their ability to charge your card.

> The debt is governed by the contract you signed, not by their ability to charge your card.

Yeah, but my ability to cancel is also governed by contract, not by their arbitrary policies around it. Unless the contract explicitly says otherwise, an email, chat, or phone call saying "I'm cancelling" is sufficient notice.

Have you ever read a gym contract?

Yeah, but apparently I go to much more ethical gyms.

> Unless the contract explicitly says otherwise, an email, chat, or phone call saying "I'm cancelling" is sufficient notice

This would not constitute legal notice under most contracts. There will be termination instructions. Often involving mailing a letter. But almost no contract technically permits termination via phone call.

Huh, okay, today I learned! Thanks for the correction. I'm used to employment contracts which just require "notice". That said, I'd argue the "often involving a letter" part:

For all my web/app/software products, including streaming video services, I can cancel within the site/app. My cellphone provider is the only one that specifies a phone call.

Even the New York Times TOS says a chat with an online agent is sufficient, and that's one of the ones being complained about in this thread.

I don't think I've ever seen "mailing a letter" required outside of a few unethical gyms.

Based on responses, I would edit/delete this comment if I could. Thanks for setting me straight

LA fitness doesn't process cancellations. You have to call and work with ABC Financial Services. I was able to actually get a refund because in my contract I was due a refund if the gym was closed for 30 or more days.

For me, I ended up going to their location and they still did not cancel.

I noticed it when I still got a charge. I then initiated a chargeback with the credit card company.

Seems like this is common enough with them that they quickly gave me my money back.

They had me mail in a cancellation letter a few years back. But I guess the scumbags have upped their game.

Same problem with a gym I joined. They required a certified letter to hq to cancel. (well didn't require it, but recommended certified)

This is why I subscribe to NYT crosswords via Apple iOS, cancelling is very easy!

This has downvotes currently for some reason, but it's true and I do the same thing for subscriptions whenever possible. There's one-click unsubscribe for any service purchased through Apple, it's really nice.

Developers need their freedom to try retention techniques on you. /s

I gave up after 10 minutes, called the credit card company I had the subscription on, and asked them to refuse all charges from NYT.

I had to do the same thing with the Economist.

I got the Economist to end the subscription over email, by using the word charge back. They apologized that they had already charged for that month, but canceled immediately and would refund my money in a few days. Too bad, because I would absolutely have resubed if they hadn't be so nasty about it.

This is why I use a third party payment service. I don't have to cancel the subscription, I just cut them off.

Credit card companies have no excuse for not being this third party payment service.

Some credit card companies offer virtual cards linked to your actual credit card that can be blocked selectively.

Which one ? I'm not aware of any current ones. BoA used to have one, but they killed it when flash was deprecated.

CapitalOne

That's not the same though, AFAIK. You can't set limits such that auto billing vendors will not be able to bill you.

The cards can be linked to specific vendors so that no one else can charge it. And you can also block the individual virtual cards in the scenario that they refuse to cancel auto-billing. It's more of an on/off limit than a granular dollar limit.

In California it is[0]

[0]https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/companies-mu...

This is a great law that I had never heard of. Given that NYT and others don't actually follow this though, how can California residents enforce this?

From what I've read, NYT and others do follow it but only for those with a California address in their system.

Apparently the trick is to change your address and then attempt to cancel.

In the other direction, I'd be quite laudable if some Californian would put in a non-California address, attempt to cancel, then sue them when they refuse.

It really should be possible from the credit card website too. Just click on a payment to say I retract permission to charge this in the future. Done.

You can send them an email.

After that chargeback until they get the point.

Similar story with wsj. They dont have a cancel online button and make you call a number. The agent then had me recite my (very long) name and email id multiple times because he ‘could not understand my accent’. There is definitely a dark pattern here and for all their shitting on the big tech, nyt and wsj certainly dont shy from using their more lucrative but shady tactics.

How long ago was this? I ask because I see a Cancel Subscription button in my account. I've only been a subscriber for about a month.

Are you in California perhaps?

No, I'm not.

My chat with agent button was kind enough to work when I was canceling my crossword subscription. When they asked why I said that I suspected their unsubscribing process to be illegal under California law and their next message was that they had unsubscribed me.

I use Revolut with a disposable virtual card for sites I don't trust. So I can immediately delete the card.

Got interested. Went to Revolut website. Uncloseable (without choosing an option) cookie banner advising me they will deliver 'relevant' ads. Have to click through to turn off the default-on ad tracking. Closed tab.

Yeah, using revolut for that is ironic, fighting scummy companies with another scummy company. It is the only way to get disposable cards or sane conversion rates in many markets unfortunately.

There is a service called privacy.com that does something similar. You can open and close new cards easily. I use it all the time for sketchy web sites.

http://privacy.com

This should be the top comment in this thread imo. This service solves a lot of the issues mentioned. No need to call anyone and beg for a cancellation, just close the card.

A caveat is that one should be aware of how binding one's agreement with a business is, and whether a simple card cancellation will make the problem go away or become worse (collections).

US credit card issuers went through the phase of offering disposable credit card numbers 15-20 years ago. And about 10 years ago they started to discontinue this option.

I think major selling point was preventing fraud, and it was a hassle for a consumer. I.e. consumer have to proactively generate virtual CC every time they pay over the Internet. Which is a pain point especially on mobile. Zero liability solved the problem for the majority of users with less friction.

With regards to subscriptions virtual credit cards are not always a solution. If you have signed a contract and then your card "expired" it doesn't magically make your contract void. I know that gyms will keep billing you and eventually will sell you to collectors.

Wise.com (formerly TransferWise) has virtual cards as well.

That doesn't work though. Those "disposable" cards are not really removed, at least not in my experience, and will still be charged. The Revolut app even conveniently notifies about the charges (but is not telling that they're from the supposedly discarded cards).

No idea about Revolut, but Citi has had a similar built-in feature since something like 2005. It's called "Virtual Account Numbers." You can set total spend limits as well as expiration dates. Once either one is hit, transactions will simply be declined.

As others have mentioned, that prevents the bills from being paid but it doesn't nullify them. They can send the unpaid bills to collections, which creates more hassle for you and negatively impacts your credit score. I wouldn't recommend relying on virtual accounts and spending limits as an alternative to proper cancellation.

Blocking the payments can still be a good idea—money you have in hand is worth far more than the dubious hope of a refund—but you should also keep clear documentation showing that you cancelled your subscription following the specific steps required by the contract before stopping payments.

The "chat with agent" option worked for me when I unsubscribed from nytimes a few months ago. They kept asking me questions and I kept responding "unsubscribe please" over and over again until they did it. It took maybe 5 minutes.

Not a good experience.

I had a similar experience. I was able to do it via chat, but the guy asked multiple questions. He LOL'd at me when I refused what must have been some kind of exception offer (I don't remember, but it was probably six months or a year for free). Right then I decided I'd never be a NYT customer again under any circumstances.

> Services handling recurring payments need to compulsorily have a cancel button.

Provided on the card provider end.

> This should be illegal.

It should. But what sort of payment processor does NYT use? Isn't it possible to block/cancel/prevent their charge from your bank's end?

Counter anecdote. I called. I said I want to cancel. The agent asked why. I said I didn't have time to read the news. He processed the cancellation.

While he was doing that I told him to make sure he just cancelled the newspaper, not my separate subscription to the crossword puzzle.

I told him I realized I was getting a 50% discount on the puzzle because of my newspaper subscription and understood I'd lose that.

He informed me that no, I would not lose the discount. The deal is a discount when you purchase a puzzle subscription if you also have a newspaper subscription. As long as my auto-renew on the puzzle subscription keeps working, it keeps renewing at that rate. And indeed it has kept doing so.

Bonus: I also cancelled DirecTV several years ago, with no problem, when they had a reputation of being very hard to cancel.

I called, said I needed to cancel, and they asked why. I explained that I loved their service, but my Sprint DSL really sucked. Comcast had just expanded to my neighborhood and so I was dropping Sprint DSL for Comcast internet. I can get a much better deal with Comcast if I get a bundle, so I was going for the Comcast Triple Play (internet, phone, TV). Hence, no more need for DirecTV (but if a decent non-Comcast internet service came to my neighborhood I'd probably switch to that and come back to DirecTV).

They cancelled me then with no hassle.

Sounds like a lot of hassle to me. I'd rather click a button.

Wasting an hour to cancel a service that I no longer need is just not right. Besides there are many services that require me to write a letter for cancellation.

This is fundamentally wrong. We need this kind of rule in USA too, so, companies cannot exploit their customers.

I had signed up for Disney+ when they launched. I decided to cancel after few months. They had no option to cancel online. I had to spend an hour on hold before I could talk to someone and cancel. I decided I will never subscribe to Disney+ again. I don’t know if the cancellation still requires calling them.

Exactly, I would want a 1-click instant cancellation rather than a 15-60 min phone conversation.

What I heard: "counter anecdote: everything you said is true and canceling the subscription is an enormous pain in the ass".

Canceling should not be more complicated than signing up. If I can sign up in 30 seconds with two clicks, why would a process with phone calls (with very long queues) be acceptable? Also, I hate questions like "why do you want to cancel?" it's none of your business!

I thought about signing up for NYT, WaPo, and other news sites to get access to some articles I was really interested in, but then I remembered how painful it is to cancel at some of these sites...

I didn't just have this experience with NYT, but also ACLU. Easy to give them your credit card, but far more difficult to get them to stop the recurring charge. This stings a lot more than NYT, because philosophically I had better opinions of ACLU.

To this day, ACLU people text me every week or so to ask me to do participate somehow. No matter how many times I've asked them to stop. And since the texts come from someone different each time, blocking isn't a viable option.

Guess who won't be getting any more of my money?

This is why I don't donate to good causes anymore (including a somewhat similar experience with the ACLU).

I'd like to donate to charity but I don't want to have to setup an untrackable shell company in the Cayman Islands in order to do it without being harassed.

In the UK we have cafonline.org which works nicely for this purpose. Nothing similar in the US?

I just recently emailed the ACLU to cancel my donation, and a week later got an email back confirming the cancellation no problem.

It wasn't exactly transparent, since the only place mentioning who to email was the "welcome" email I got when I signed up ages ago. But I was able to cancel by a single email to the address they'd provided.

I never had this problem with the ACLU. Sorry it sucks for you.

I heard anecdotally that you can use a VPN, switch location to california, log back in to nytimes and suddenly a cancel button appears on your manage your billing page.

nytimes is the worst, next to predatory gym memberships. It took me 45 minutes in a chat with the agent screen to cancel my membership, and they refused to send me any confirmation or email. He told me to screenshot our chat.

The NYTimes is nothing more than a government propaganda machine these days, anyways.

This is infuriating, but in the meantime you should find a bank that offers virtual and ideally virtual disposable cards. When I sign up for something new / untrusted and I'm not sure if I can unsub easily, I always use the virtual disposable CC so that they can only charge me once. 2nd charge will simply not work because the card is single-use.

(Downside is, they can ban you forever if the charge doesn't go through, but for services that do those shady things, I wouldn't like to be their customer anyway).

Re: the difficulty of unsubbing: GDPR specifies that disallowing consent should be as easy as allowing it. There should be similar law about online subs.

Sounds like a very complex Roach Motel.

Use a certified letter to their legal dept.

A few years back...

Someone bought me a Sirius XM handheld unit for XMas. I hated it, used it for a few hours, cancelled the service, and returned the unit.

2 years later I get a several hundred dollar charge on a CC for another year or two of service of Sirius. I call up the CC company, and they say before I can file a dispute I have to call Sirius and try to straighten it out.

I call up Sirius, explain, I only owned the unit for a few hours and that I had cancelled. And the customer-service agent said, "I understand. We don't care, we're billing you anyways." and hung up.

I called the credit card company back, and they (probably) didn't believe me, but the agent said, "look, I'll put us on a 3-way call with Sirius, try and cancel your service again and I will listen and we will see what happens."

So I went through the same process again, and again Sirius literally said, "We understand you cancelled, there's nothing you can do."

After the call, the CC company agent (I think Discover) said, "These people are crazy, I will take care of this."

Agreed 100% - SO ANNOYING!

These are the same places that write hit pieces on big tech for "abusing" users - ie, Apple's payment platform which DOES let you easily cancel ALL subscriptions that you sign up through them and reminds you to do so if you delete apps etc.

Same shenanigans with Netgear router customer service. They have a "you are _" in line customer service that sounds like it's glitched out to get you to quit. I stayed on the line. Estimate went from 40 minutes, randomly jumping around but also increasing to 90 minutes. After 2 hours (I just put it on speaker and kept coding) suddenly it went from 90 minutes to someone is speaking to me.

> He doesn't let me cancel...

This is the part that baffles me. There's no "let me cancel". You are giving notice of cancellation by telephone as required. Clearly the agent understands why you are calling. Therefore you have given notice. Therefore the service is cancelled. Any further attempt to charge your card is fraud.

Of course it doesn't work this way in the US, since the cost of fighting this point there is more than the cost of your subscription. Therefore this kind of abuse is permitted there.

As others have mentioned, they actually do have a cancel button, for Californians. The fact that they have the feature, but disable it when they aren't legally required to provide it, is for me an unforgivable offence.

Remember that Google demo of the AI voice making reservations? That was dumb, but what wouldn't be dumb is the same thing but for cancelling subscriptions.

Agreed. It is totally messed up when it is just easier to cancel the credit card the charge goes to instead of the actual charge.

Because of this my approach these days is to use a different virtual credit card number for every subscription.

That way when I want to cancel I can cut off the card to be sure I wont get charged again “by mistake”

privacy.com is a good one

This is one thing I love about the subscription model on iOS. Apple forces vendors to go through their infrastructure, which means it's always dead easy to stop something.

What NYT (and others) do is just ridiculous and unethical.

> Services handling recurring payments need to compulsorily have a cancel button.

We don't really need a law for this nor anyone needs to implement a button. Visa, Mastercard etc. can simply run a service where all the transactions that are marked as "recurring" will have an associated button "Revoke payment authorization" in their app. Once you revoke it all future recurring payments for that authorization will fail. It should be the responsibility of merchant to ensure they have authorization before providing service.

This can be sold as "Peace of Mind"^(TM) service and merchants who opt into this can can proudly show it off. Those merchants who do not have this, might have to show a warning to their customers that it is not a "Peace of Mind"^(TM) merchant.

Further I am pretty sure Mastercard, Visa can easily see which merchants are problematic. I am sure SiriusXM, La Fitness etc. will be on the top of their list and they can create a threshold beyond which those problematic merchants will have to pay a higher transaction fee in order to continue or opt into "Peace of Mind"^(TM) program.

The real issue here is the the regulation. All Fintech companies are super scared to try anything new as the various federal agencies will make an example out of anyone who builds something that disrupts the market. Entire history of financial regulation in this country is about protecting the interests of the existing players only and all the existing players are mostly indistinguishable from each other. Rarely someone like Robinhood tries to disrupt and you can see how much shit the media partners throw on RH. While many of these media partners tell you how dangerous RH is nearly no one explains why Fidelity, MorganStanley etc. have such shitty and outdated sites and UX.

Change your payment to PayPal and then cancel through PP.

I am imagining a nice red button on an online credit card statement labelled "Cancel Subscription". Similar to the unsubscribe button/link in emails.

Stripe emailed me about this the other day, and are handling it pretty seamlessly. Recurring charges are not being banned. An additional factor of authentication is required above a certain threshold, and pre-debit notifications need to be sent. They're sensible rules which more countries should adopt.

I remember Xbox Live in like mid 2000's letting you sign up on the website but there was no cancel option. You had to call in. You were usually on wait for an hour, and then an hour of being harassed by the sales people. In theory, I don't see anything that prevents them from just endlessly passing you in a loop to prevent you from cancelling like some sort of video game mechanic.

This was also when there was not really any possible home VOIP or landlines, and cell phone minutes were very expensive.

The only real solution was to buy prepaid xbox cards.

This isn't particularly helpful advice at this point - but there was a heavy overlap between most people still having a landline and VOIP options. For a long time google let you dial a phone directly from the gmail web UI - it might still let you do that if you're on the legacy feature (they did recently drop incoming call support though).

This article is from 2014. Have the rules not changed since? This article indicates otherwise: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/your-re...

Stripe have recently been sending out emails related to problems with recurring payments for customers in India, so I guess it's still an issue.

Rules are being implemented from 1st October and not just for credit cards, for ALL transactions that are autonomous.

Source: I live in India and got an sms from my bank stating the same.

This makes my netflix subscription easy to cancel.. usually I used to be lazy to go and cancel but every month my account goes on hold! That's a life saver as I'm saturated with netflix now and it's wrong to make everything bloody subscription.

This is not a ban, and has been in the works for a long time with at least one six-month extension granted that I know of.[1] What the RBI has done is introduce AFA (additional factor authentication) for recurring transactions.[2]

But this is India and we like to do things one day before any deadline expires. That explains the panic.

[1] https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=1205...

[2] https://support.stripe.com/questions/important-updates-to-rb...

> But this is India and we like to do things one day before any deadline expires. That explains the panic.

This made me laugh. But rest assured, things aren't any better in the US when some regulation comes with plenty notice. (Thinking most recently about the Cures Act where healthcare info must be accessible to patient without putting up blocks; many healthcare providers only started thinking about it at the last minute)

Needed initiative, given that a large part of the population is not tech savvy.

While I didn't work on indian regulations, I've worked directly on 2FA/OTP with recurring charges. For this regulation, the recurring charge must be initiated with an OTP code, but subsequent charges may happen automatically. There should also be an exception process to allow preexisting standing instructions to continue.

This article has details of the actual regulation: https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-why-au...

I believe it started that way but now everyone has just stopped recurring. I have already got email notifications from AWS (India), my phone provider, etc. that we have to pay manually from next month.

> everyone has just stopped recurring

Every one had two years to implement the e-mandate system.[1] What does it say about Amazon, your phone provider and your card issuer that they haven't been able to do it in time and decided, instead, to pass the buck to you, the customer?

[1] https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=1166...

Yes, because most services haven't met the full scope of the RBI circular yet - sending pre-debit notification, self serve mandate revocation, etc

This is super old new 2014 article. One of the biggest problems in India is most of the people are not well educated on differences of credit card vs debit cards. Also there is little to no fraud projection offered to the customers and that's why government is enforcing two factor authentication. If anything happens and you loose money from bank account due to debit card transaction bank will provide you no help what so ever. Its almost like you lost all the money.

I got an sms from my bank today that scheduled transactions will not be honoured by the bank.. with effect 1st oct

So yes circular is old but it's being implemented on 1st oct..

There are a lot of shady merchant schemes regarding recurring payments. In the past, I knew hidden charges (i.e., recurring charges I fail to notice) would eventually stop as my credit card would eventually expire in their system. By shady merchants (like AAA, for example, which otherwise claims to be a reputable company), for my "convenience" update by guessing my expired credit card's new expiration date! Thus, they keep charging me forever! So, I'm sorry, recurring charges as both convenient and borderline scams! If I was aware of each upcoming payment and I had to approve it, then I would be spending a lot less money each month!

Google just emailed me too and I have to pay these manually or face service disruption. I have auto billing setup at so many places like porkbun, many Saas services, amazon, Google, digitalocean, etc.

God knows how many reminders I will have to add and how much time I will have to waste every month paying these bills by hand now and I hope I don't miss any.

I can only wish like digitalocean, amazon google too provide provisions to add account balance so I can add money as failsafe.

It is a huge legal hassle at the moment in India. For amounts greater than 10K they have to KYC you. KYC is not only complex but also needs to be renewed on regular basis and failing to do it can lead to several punishment from Indian government.

This is a fairly old article, and the title suggests there is a recent ban on recurring charges. Am I missing something here?

Here's one from last week. https://wap.business-standard.com/article/finance/rbi-s-firm...

Much more detailed article from 6 months ago. https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-why-au...

Willow.tv is a major culprit here. There is no cancellation button on the website, and you are required to email a support person multiple times (back and forth with retention offers) for cancellation. They are in violation of CA law that prohibits this behavior.

Credit card issuers in India have not been as proactive as they should have been to protect consumers from scammy subscriptions. I was bitten by such an app on the play store that charged my card $50 after a 3 day trial. Google wouldn't do anything about it, and my card issuer said "if you willingly entered your card info then we can't do anything about it". Only I entered my info into Google, long before I downloaded the app. Google should have asked me before charging the card. Consent to charge and the charge itself should be done at the same time.

So I'm OK with this. Either behave responsibly or get regulated. Sounds fair.

The title is misleading, this is a very old article.

Am I wrong to say that it's not fair to say they banned all forms of recurring charges? I thought that most of the new regs were around informing the person about to be charged that it is coming and better handling for making the charges stop.

Not wrong!! These scheduled transaction use our laziness/ inattentiveness to mint money from us.

I wonder if you can take control yourself (albeit not real solutions) by:

- reporting your card lost, requesting replacement

- (with Apple Card) requesting a new number

- disabling / locking the card temporarily during the period they'd try to charge you

- use a service that provides a "virtual" card for such vendors, and then just deleting it (e.g. PayPal Key)

Yes there is collateral damage in the process (other payments get dinged, you have to wait for a new card, etc.) but perhaps it would work, and you wouldn't lose money?

I think what India did here helps customers. Ofcourse, it may not help service providers. Anyway, customers should decide on the payment. If the customer doesn't pay, company should stop the service.

There's a web site that provides debit cards with a $ limit, so you set up the subscription on the card and simply fail to fund the card when the subscription expires.

Can't remember the name of it, though.

How are other countries dealing with recurring card charges? Is there a reasoning why Indian regulations in this regard should be different from those in the USA, for example?

The US is a very poor example in how to implement financial service regulations (a better example would be Europe, where they have instant payments and cram down interchange fees with regulation). Non-Indian software companies are accustom to business friendly recurring payment policies, not the more consumer-focused financial regulations India has.

From OP's relevant article link [1]:

> He adds that this directive caters to two problems. Discontinuing standing instruction to a merchant was a task earlier while some asked for a letter by post asking for the discontinuation.

> Moreover, credit cards were mainly used for recurring payments while debit cards weren't as much in use.

So, it would seem that the regulator is attempting to make it harder for businesses to lock customers into recurring payments they don't want, and to encourage debit card use versus credit card use. I imagine this is keeping in line with India not wanting capitalistic colonialism, which is why the Indian central bank kneecapped US payment networks [2] in support of their own instant payment system (UPI [3]). Developing countries don't want to pay unnecessary drag on their economic systems to rent seeking first world corporations, if they can avoid it.

[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/banking/financ...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57817618

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

Preventing a consumer from subscribing something they want through an automated recurring payment may not be a consumer friendly thing as well.

Perhaps the inability of the Indian framework to appropriately deal with fraud and other nefarious uses like misleading the consumer, etc is prompting such blanket measures.

In other words, is potentially throwing the baby with the bathwater, a good policy?

As a regulator, you use the tools you have, not the tools you have to go begging for you may not get. Perfect is the enemy of good enough.

It does feel like regulator is abdicating its responsibility "in detail" by such a measure, where as it could have acted to declare the norms under which recurrant payments could be done in a legitimate manner, and continue to actively monitor and oversee their enforcement.

Regulator of course have to work with the tools they have, but here it looks more like they are preferring to take a shortcut.

If there is an alternative & sovereign way for recurring payments to still happen without paying an obscene rent on the whole economy to Americans who provide little to no value locally, I don't see the issue. Look up Autogiro in the nordics.

The regulator has done precisely what you suggest — allow automatic recurring payments with a slightly stronger validation threshold and some conditions. The article is about certain entities along the payment processing chain dragging their feet on implementing the requisite updates. Many have complied (see Eg: comments about Stripe), and the switchover has been relatively seamless.

Perhaps. It is reasonable policy in the context. It is similar on other side also. Customers can't return stuff back in retail stores to get cash back in India.

Funny story: A couple of years back a relative of mine visited US on office trip. Staying in a mid-level hotel they were surprised to know that they can just walk-in hotel's breakfast buffet, eat as much they want and even carry fruits, baked item etc while leaving. Back in India, hotel would do 2 level of ID/ security check before being ushered to buffet area and carrying any food item outside is prohibited.

So customer and service provider both have high chance to be defrauded by party at other end of transaction.

>Back in India, hotel would do 2 level of ID/ security check before being ushered to buffet area and carrying any food item outside is prohibited.

Never run into the ID/security check in my years of traveling here. At best, it is a "which room are you from" to mark off in their list. Carrying food out - that depends on the place.

Well of-course.

Many have not run into restaurant fraud where they ask unsuspecting customers into ordering off-menu items like mixed-kebab platter or some such and then check comes in for 2000 rupees for that item but I have been duped like that.

Same with hotel ID check maybe they do in high fraud regions where a group of people walk in confidently, looked the part, polished off meal and left quietly.

As far as I can tell, the US doesn't regulate this much at all. Certain newspapers are notorious for making it difficult to unsubscribe.

IMO, merchants should be required to have an obvious unsubscribe button on your account page. Or perhaps all recurring payments managed through the consumer's bank, so a list can be provided for easy "bulk" management.

I am so pissed with this rule. Every month I have to login into my AWS account and pay the bills manually even if it is just < $10.

I can't auto pay for DO now. Hmm.

Link is 2 years old article.

7 years old. It's from 2014.

I'm extremely sorry; the title is correct with what's happening with India's RBI[1] regulations banning all recurring card charges from next month.

But I have added the wrong link from the wrong tab. This new Safari is pretty confusing.

Here is a more relevant article - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/banking/financ...

1. https://www.rbi.org.in

The article you linked suggests that recurring card charges that use two factor authentication will not be banned. So I think the title is still overstating.

2FA with Cards in India is an OTP (One Time Password) that sends us an SMS Message on our phone. Which means, even if the recurring happens, you still need to have access to the site and then enter the OTP at that time to make it work.

It's a one time authorization

That isn't how it will work

- First charge needs a AFA and it will setup a mandate - Subsequent charges will use that mandate and work without 2FA - Cardholders need to be notified in advance of a debit and be given an option to cancel

What's breaking now for most services is handling the third part

actual title == [The RBI’s stringent rules on recurring payments are driving away India’s software companies]

the actual title of a submission is subject to HN guidelines, the current title [ndia bans all form of Recurring Card Charges] is in no way similar]

highly editorialized titles create assumptions and non sequitorial context before anyone else even reads the article. you should talk to dang about this at HN@ycombinator.com

Assuming dang doesn't get to it sooner, you could email hn@ycombinator.com to ask for the link to be updated.

The HN title is still incorrect/editorialized, even for the Economic Times article.

The Indian Express article (from a few months ago, when the deadline was extended to Sep 30) details the changes with much more clarity: https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-why-au...

The crux of the changes are to add an additional factor of authentication (AFA), notify consumers before any recurring charge, and allow them to easily cancel payments. This sounds like extremely healthy regulation, and I have no sympathy for merchants dragging their feet on this for years.

>The crux of the changes are to add an additional factor of authentication (AFA), notify consumers before any recurring charge, and allow them to easily cancel payments. This sounds like extremely healthy regulation, and I have no sympathy for merchants dragging their feet on this for years.

I subscribe to Netflix from my mobile ISP in India, and they've implemented it from day one. I get a message a few days ahead of the renewal every month, when the service can be cancelled before billing.

Example -

Enjoying Netflix with airtelThanks? You will be charged Rs. 499.0 for the period 31-08-2021 to 29-09-2021 in your next bill. To unsubscribe from Netflix, SMS STOP NETFLIX to 56111 within 4 day(s).

Really like this legislation simply because the cancellation ability is available pretty much every month!

It's great that Netflix has this functionality, but it's frustrating that Netflix has it built out, but only deploys it where legally compelled to. It shows how these companies are not very consumer friendly.

It's also frustrating that they aren't legally compelled to in my jurisdiction :)

This is not by Netflix, it is by the ISP through whom I purchase the service. But yeah, the ISP has been scummier in the past, it's only a little less scummy now!

Ok, we've changed the title to what the (new) article actually says. (Submitted title was "India bans all form of Recurring Card Charges".)

Ok, we've changed to that URL from https://qz.com/india/229295/the-rbis-stringent-rules-on-recu....

I use privacy.com to create virtual debit cards for all online payments, especially recurring ones. I can set limts on monthly, annual or one time charges and cancel it myself at anytime. the other added benefit is that if you lose your debit card you only have to change the number with privacy.com you don't have to go to each vender and update to a new card number.

I highly recommend this service as well.

Works only in US, when u suggest something make sure if it works for the rest of the World. Or at-least please do mention about the limitation. US =/= World.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com