Account Updater
Learn how Recurly's Account Updater automatically keeps credit and debit card details current before payments fail.
Account Updater
Protect your recurring revenue by automatically keeping card details up to date — before payments ever fail.
What is Account Updater?
A proactive assistant designed to resolve card lifecycle events before they trigger a decline. Reduce involuntary churn and eliminate gateway fees on invalid accounts.
🧩 The simple version
When a customer's credit or debit card expires, gets lost or stolen, or is reissued by their bank, the card number or expiration date changes. If you're charging that card on a recurring basis — like a subscription renewal — that charge will simply fail. The customer hasn't cancelled; their card just changed.
Account Updater (AU) is the solution. It's a service run by the major card networks — Visa, Mastercard, American Express (AMEX), and Discover — that automatically pushes updated card details to Recurly. Recurly stores that fresh information so that your next billing attempt uses the correct data, without the customer needing to do anything.
Standard account updater
Supported for Visa, Mastercard, American Express (AMEX), and Discover. Updates are fetched via secure batch files before renewal attempts.
Real-time account updater (RTAU)
Supported for Visa, Mastercard, and American Express (AMEX) globally, with Discover support available via specific gateways.
Cardrefresher
American Express (AMEX)'s specialized AU service. While many updates now happen via RTAU, Cardrefresher provides a robust fallback for legacy integrations.
🗺️ How it works — step by step
A cardholder's bank issues a card change
This could be a new card number or updated expiration date. Common events: annual renewals, fraud replacements, or bank migrations.
The card network is notified
Visa, Mastercard, American Express (AMEX), or Discover updates their internal records with the new card details.
Recurly is alerted
For standard AU, Recurly checks for updates on a scheduled basis. For RTAU, Recurly requests the update at the exact moment a transaction is attempted.
Recurly updates the stored payment method
For all participating banks and eligible card types, new card details replace the old ones in the vault—silently, automatically, and without action required from your customer.
The next renewal charges successfully
Because the billing info is already up to date, the subscription renews without interruption. No failed payment. No dunning. No involuntary churn.
Note on digital wallets: Account Updater works with cards stored in Recurly's vault. Apple Pay and Google Pay handle card lifecycle updates natively within their own ecosystem.
The Bottom Line
Account Updater fixes outdated card details behind the scenes. It's one of the few revenue recovery tools that is entirely proactive rather than reactive.
📚 Additional resources
📖 Recurly Docs: Account Updater 🎧 Contact Recurly Support 🌐 Join Global Office HoursUpdated about 9 hours ago