Apple Pay merchant tokens

An Apple Pay merchant token (MPAN) ties together a payment card, a business, and a customer, and enables the wallet holder to manage access to a card stored in their Apple wallet. Apple Pay’s latest guidelines recommend merchant tokens over device tokens (DPANs) because merchant tokens:

• Allow for continuity across multiple devices
• Enable recurring payments independent of a device
• Keep payment information active in a new device even when its removed from a lost or stolen device
• Come with lifecycle management features to monitor changes to a token or to see if a token has been revoked

Merchant token types

You can use Apple Pay to request an MPAN in three ways. Each type of request has different parameters that affect how the user is presented with Apple Wallet. Almost all request types provide the option to supply a managementURL, which routes customers to a webpage to manage their payment methods. If you request an MPAN and the issuer supports MPAN generation, you receive an MPAN. Otherwise, you receive a DPAN.

Add Apple Pay merchant tokens

You can add a merchant token when presenting Apple Pay in the Express Checkout Element, web Payment Element, and mobile Payment Element. Stripe automatically handles merchant token requests in Stripe Checkout integrations.

expressCheckoutElement.on("click", (e) => {
  const options = {
    applePay: {
      recurringPaymentRequest: {
        paymentDescription: "Standard Subscription",
        regularBilling: {
          amount: 1000,
          label: "Standard Package",
          recurringPaymentStartDate: new Date("2023-03-31"),
          recurringPaymentEndDate: new Date("2024-03-31"),
          recurringPaymentIntervalUnit: "year",
          recurringPaymentIntervalCount: 1,
        },
        billingAgreement: "billing agreement",
        managementURL: "https://stripe.com",
      },
    },
  };
  e.resolve(options);
});

Merchant token auth rate monitoring

For Sigma users, the charges table contains a card_token_type enum field to indicate the charge is using an mpan or dpan card. The following Sigma query example calculates the MPAN auth rate:

-- deduplicated MPAN auth rate
select
  100.0 * count(
    case
      when charge_outcome in ('authorized', 'manual_review') then 1
    end
  ) / count(*) as deduplicated_auth_rate_pct,
  count(*) as n_attempts
from
  authentication_report_attempts a
  join charges c on c.id = a.charge_id
where
  c.created >= date('2021-01-01')
  and c.card_tokenization_method = 'apple_pay'
  -- The new field added to charges table.
  and c.card_token_type = 'mpan'
  -- deduplicate multiple manual retries to a single representative charge
  and is_final_attempt