Justgiving's new processing partner - lower fees, better reliability and scalability

Justgiving has a new payment processing partner. From now on, all donations made through our site will be processed by RBS Lynk Inc (RBS) through their Bibit platform.

What does this mean?

Lower card charges on every donation:

•    Credit cards (Visa/Mastercard) = 1.34% (Mastercard was 1.4%)
•    Debit cards (Switch/Maestro/Solo) = 22p per donation
•    Visa Delta/Visa Electron = 22p per donation (was 23p)

These are amazingly low rates, and are due to the volume of transactions made on Justgiving. Here's what they used to be.

More reliable, more scalable and faster

We've joined one of the largest payment card processing service providers in Europe and we are one of their top clients globally, in terms of volume.

That means we're confident that they can handle the massive volumes of donations we process in the busiest times (we were processing 100 donations a minute the Friday before the last London Marathon). Already, donations are being processed over twice as fast.

Oh, and we join a little-known (just the five billion songs downloaded) online music retailer in using this service, as well as an extremely popular travel website. So it’s a very reliable platform that will scale as we continue to grow.

No more Verified by VISA (VBV) or MasterCard SecureCode (MCSC) on Justgiving for now [except for Maestro cards where it's compulsory]

We first introduced VBV and MCSC back in October 2006 as an early adopter of what was supposed to become a web standard for more secure card processing online. It turns out that it hasn't become web standard. Yet.

We found that people donating through our site were not aware of these services, sometimes even thinking they were a phishing scam, when in fact it was extra security! We put our donor/fundraiser helpdesk number (0845 021 2110) up on the pages where VBV or MCSC appeared so people could call us if they were unsure, but we had no control over the content or appearance of that page.

We monitored the number of people who started making a donation and went on to finish the process, and found it decreased when VBV and MCSC were switched on.

Taking VBV and MCSC off meant we were charged more

We switched off VBV and MCSC at the end of last year to encourage more people to finish the donation process and increase the volume of donations to charities. But this meant we were charged higher processing charges for every donation. 

We didn't pass that charge on to charities. We took the view that we didn't want to increase our fees and have less money go to them. So we took the hit. What did that mean to us?

A £350,000 loss.

So we are happy that we won't have to have them on the site for the foreseeable future (and that our Chief Financial Office can finally sleep soundly again).

Don't worry, we're still totally secure

We've been PCI compliant (Level 2) for over a year. As we said then, "we can now provide VISA-certified assurances to any enquiries about the security of our users' credit card and personal data."

We are not saying that either the VBV or MCSC schemes are in any way insecure - it is just that most people do not know what they are and are baffled when they come across them.

What's next...

We’re excited about our new partnership with RBS, and confident that charities on Justgiving will benefit a lot from this move.

It’s been an intense 6-week project for our development team, powered by a mountain of takeaway pizzas and sugary concoctions - but this is just the first step of our move to RBS and part of a massive program of investment in a new platform and product culminating in a complete overhaul of the site by the end of the year…