Overview

What are SDD mandates?

SDD, stands for SEPA Direct Debit. And thus, SDD mandates are documents authorizing a creditor to collect payments from a debtor.

There are two different SDD implementations. SDD Core and SDD B2B. SDD Core is intented to be used for all kinds of direct debit transactions, while SDD B2B is intended for recurring transactions between businesses.

In Digiteal, we only support SDD Core.

Mandate management

Responsibilities of the creditor

Obtaining the mandate
Storing the mandate
Notifying the debtor when funds will be collected

Using our API we facilitate these responsibilities. We allow you to easily obtain a mandate through our API, as well as retrieve the mandate document at any time. For payments, it's the same story: you can easily make payments through our API while we keep you up to date with the payment life cycle through our webhooks.

Rights of the debtor

It is important to be aware that the debtor can cancel the mandate at any time. If this cancellation is performed by the debtor in his bank, the creditor will not be notified directly. The creditor will however see the effect of this cancellation during the next withdrawal through the standard SDD reason codes.

Integrating SDD payments

The steps involved for integration are as follows:

Obtaining consent form the debtor, see Inital setup
Transferring the mandate to our platform, see Mandate transfer
Make SDD payments, see SDD Payments

Exception handling in the context of SDD payments

Sometimes one of the parties involved does not or cannot process the payment (you can be notified of this with a webhook of type PAYMENT_INITIATION_ERROR if the initiation fails, PAYMENT_WITHDRAWAL_ERROR if the withdrawal fails, REIMBURSMENT_TO_CLIENT_FROM_DIGITEAL if the withdrawal fails after Digiteal has received the funds and before they have been transferred to the creditor or REIMBURSMENT_TO_CLIENT_FROM_REQUESTOR if the withdrawal fails after the funds have been transferred to the creditor). The handling of these exceptions involves the sending of messages called R-transactions. The R stands for all the possible reasons for the exception (Refusal, Reject, Refund, Reversal and Return). When a payment fails using our platform we provide you these codes in our notifications and using the standard SDD reason codes you can troubleshoot why some payments may fail and inform the relevant party of his non-processing of the payment.

Since the reasons of a non-process can vary greatly and the fact that banks can fine the debtor for insufficient funds, we do not advise you to automatically relaunch an SDD withdrawal. Instead, please use the SDD reason code to take the appropriate action while keeping your customer informed:

delete the mandate if it cannot be used anymore (ex: AC01, AC04, AC13, MD01, MD07) and propose your customer to set up a new mandate
propose to relaunch the SDD withdrawal if there were insufficient funds (ex: AM04 and maybe MS03) and the customer now has the required funds on his bank account
as an alternative, propose the customer uses another payment method (eventually cancelling the mandate)