Importing Card mandates

What is a Card mandate?

A card mandate is a recurring authorization provided by a customer allowing a business to charge their card on a regular basis. This is commonly used for subscriptions, memberships, saved cards, and installment payments. Mandates ensure continuous service delivery without requiring repeated customer input for every transaction.

Mollie ​offers ​the ​possibility ​to ​migrate the ​existing ​credit ​card ​mandates ​from your ​current ​Payment ​Service ​Provider.

This is a general playbook. The exact details vary slightly depending on which provider you’re coming from, and your person of contact at Mollie will guide you through the specifics for your situation.

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This migration procedure pertains only to card mandates.
For SEPA Direct Debit and PayPal mandates, you can use the Customers and Mandates API.

Why import Card mandates?

If you’re moving to Mollie from another payment provider and you already charge customers on a recurring basis (e.g., subscriptions, memberships, saved cards, etc.), migrating mandates will help you move those existing customers with as little interruption as possible.

Before you begin

• Set up and plan ahead: create your Mollie account in advance and agree on a date and next steps with our Sales Engineering team to run the import.
• Loop in your current provider early: they'll need to nominate a contact who can export your mandates in the required format - this is often the slowest part, so start it sooner rather than later.
• Allow enough time: a migration typically takes a minimum of 2–3 weeks, given the compliance and integration steps involved. Build in buffer for possible delays and plan your go-live accordingly.

Why card migrations need specific handling

Card mandates contain sensitive raw card details. Hence, they cannot be moved around casually or sent over by email or API. The data has to be handled in a secure, PCI-compliant way from start to finish.

In practice this means the file containing your mandates is always encrypted, in a way that only Mollie can read, before it ever leaves your previous provider.

Mollie provides the encryption key which the previous PSP uses to encrypt the file, and the data is transferred over securely - generally using an SFTP server. You don't need to handle any card data yourself, but it's important to understand why the process is more involved than a simple data export.

How the migration works: Process Overview

The procedure of importing credit card mandates includes the following stages:

1. Collecting your mandate data
   • Get in touch with your current provider and ask them to nominate a contact person who can initiate the secure transfer of your mandate file to Mollie.
   • We will work with you and your provider to confirm and verify data completeness.
   • We will require confirmation of the number of active mandates you expect to migrate.
2. Coordinating with Mollie
   • Notify our Support, Sales Engineering, Solutions Engineering, or Implementation team - or your CSM - of your intention to import existing mandates
   • Together we'll confirm the expected timelines and agree the next steps so everyone is aligned before any data moves.
3. Exporting and securely transferring the data
   • Your PSP is responsible for following Mollie’s guidelines to make sure the source file is in the correct format.
   • The file must be delivered as a CSV and include, at minimum:
     - Card number
     - Expiry date
     - Cardholder name
     - External mandate token
     - Original transaction ID (trace ID)
   • Before the file leaves your provider, it's encrypted using the PGP key Mollie provides, so only Mollie can open it, and it's then passed to us through the agreed manner.
   • Once we receive it, we verify the data and confirm its integrity after transfer.
4. Processing
   • After ​the ​file ​is ​decrypted ​and ​the ​source ​is ​verified, Mollie securely ingests the records and assigns new, Mollie-specific token references to each mandate. ​Depending ​on ​the number ​of ​mandates, ​this procedure can ​take ​a few hours ​to ​complete.
5. Testing & Validation - Using the generated Output File
   • Using ​the ​output ​file, ​link ​your ​existing ​mandates ​to ​the newly ​generated ​mandates so that Mollie can start processing all new incoming payments.
   • We generate an output file that links each mandate reference from your previous provider to the new Mollie customer and mandate references.
   • The migration process only migrates the card information used for the mandate and not the subscription logic itself: the merchant is responsible for ensuring the subscription management system can use the new Mollie references:

     • If the merchant is using an integration to manage subscriptions, the merchant must update this integration to accept the new Mollie references.

     • If the customer built their own subscription management logic, the merchant must update it to accept the new Mollie references.

6. Going Live

   • After the references have been adjusted, we advise running a few tests on the imported data to ensure mandates work as expected and are billed without any issues.

   • Monitor transactions closely through the first billing cycle to confirm everything is charging as expected.

7. Customer Communication (Optional but recommended)
   • It's good practice to let your customers know about the upcoming change and to reassure them that no action is needed on their part.
   • A short, clear heads-up helps avoid confusion when they see the new provider on their statement.

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Make sure to confirm the number of successfully imported mandates using our ​API. The following endpoint allows you ​​to ​do it: Get mandate