Area of expertise · Payments compliance

Subscription payment issues often emerge gradually, affecting specific markets or renewals rather than causing widespread disruptions.

This structured assessment reviews the payments setup across eight dimensions, including authentication, mandates, failed-payment recovery, and market divergence. It identifies areas where recurring revenue may be at risk before losses occur.

  • 4 min
  • 15 questions
  • 8 dimensions
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Developed based on practical experience

Why this is not a standard compliance checklist

Compliance and revenue are closely connected, but are often managed independently. Rules for authenticating recurring charges directly affect payment success rates, with failures frequently leading to lost subscribers rather than voluntary cancellations. This assessment reviews the payments setup from both regulatory and financial perspectives, drawing on practical experience managing authentication programmes across multiple European markets.

What it assesses

The assessment covers eight weighted dimensions. The report assigns a score to each and identifies any gaps.

  1. 1

    SCA and exemption strategy

    Assesses whether charging without repeated authentication follows a documented design or relies on default settings.

  2. 2

    Multi-market resilience

    Evaluates whether the setup reflects actual market behaviour, including issuer readiness, local payment preferences, and the UK's position outside the regime.

  3. 3

    Authentication friction and recovery

    Covers all steps from charge attempt to successful collection or customer loss, including challenges, declines, retries, and backup methods.

  4. 4

    Mandate and credential integrity

    Assesses whether original authorisation, stored credentials, and transaction references remain valid after card changes or expiration.

  5. 5

    PSP delegation and liability

    Examines which responsibilities are held by the payment provider versus the business, and whether contractual obligations are clearly defined.

  6. 6

    Payment performance visibility

    Assesses whether authorisation rates, decline reasons, and involuntary churn are measured and segmented, or aggregated into a single metric.

  7. 7

    Renewal transparency and consumer obligations

    Reviews advance notice of charges, cancellation processes, and dispute resolution across all served markets.

  8. 8

    PSD3/PSR readiness

    Evaluates how upcoming changes have been translated into an actionable plan with clear ownership, in preparation for the 2028 application.

The assessment

The assessment consists of fifteen questions across four screens. The resulting report provides an overall score, details gaps in each of the eight dimensions, highlights significant exposures, explains how the incoming regime applies to this particular setup, and outlines the relevant timeline.

The assessment loads here

The interactive questionnaire runs in the browser and calls a small serverless proxy so the API key stays server-side.

Book a call in the meantime

If the constraint is the billing platform itself rather than the payments setup running on it, the platform migration assessment covers that ground.

Open the migration assessment →