In recent months, we’ve been hard at work improving one of the most critical elements of our donation platform: payment processing. We know you expect this part of Planning Center Giving to work flawlessly every time – on the web, on the mobile app, using a card, or using a bank account.
Payment Processing v2
The world of payment processing has been rapidly changing. Whether it’s fighting fraud, adopting new currencies, or supporting the myriad of new forms of digital payment, no payment processor stays ahead of the curve like Stripe.
A few years ago Stripe introduced a new framework for processing payments called “Payment Intents.” As time has gone by it’s clear that Payment Intents is Stripe’s future. All of their new features, safeguards, currency support, and payment functionality are being poured into Payment Intents. It could be described as “Stripe v2.”
We’ve just completed migrating all payment processing over to this new system. In the coming weeks and months you’ll start to see some new features in Planning Center Giving that are directly related to this change. The first of these new benefits is…
Faster ACH Donation Settlement
For customers in the US, ACH bank transfers now take 4 days to settle instead of 6. Since the bulk of church giving happens on a Sunday, that means the transaction will settle within the same week the donation was given.
Donations made by ACH bank transfer are still just $0.25 per donation with no percentage fee.
More to Come
There are a few more benefits that come with this major upgrade to our Stripe engine. We’ll be announcing those soon. The other benefit to finishing this work is that we can get back to building more features and functionality into the product itself. We’re excited for what’s next.
~ The Planning Center Giving team
Jeremy, Peter, Josh, Mo, Daniel, Breanne, Wassim, and Christian