1451704 - [Form Autofill] Support SEPA's IBAN and BIC like credit card for Direct Bank Debit (EU market)

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Form Autofill, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Jens]

The support for Credit Card Form Autofill is nice, but at least in Germany SEPA Direct Debit is much more common, popular, secure and consumer rights friendly than Credit Cards (Besides consumer rights, it's also much cheaper for stores). For instance, I always use SEPA direct debit online, but never Credit Cards.

It would be a Unique Selling Point for Firefox if it would support storing and autofilling of IBAN (bank account ID number) and BIC (ID of the bank). These two ID fields would needed to be stored in a similar way like the Credit Card stuff is.

For instance, in Germany paying via Credit Card is not really popular, SEPA is much more common and is *the* official way of payming in the EU:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area#SEPA_Direct_Debit

In the end you might want to get someone from your Berlin office working on this :) They'll know what SEPA is and how it is working.

Comment 1

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

CC'ing the web payments PM about this idea.

Comment 2

[chsiang]

Hi Jens,
That's a very good point. I am copying Peter and Marcos on this to bring it up during payment handler discussions with W3C further down the road. 

Thanks.
Cindy

Comment 3

[Peter Saint-Andre [:stpeter]]

There has been discussion about this at the W3C. See for instance:

https://w3c.github.io/payment-method-credit-transfer/

and a recent discussion on the mailing list:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-payments-wg/2018May/0003.html

Jens, in addition to this feature request here, you can provide feedback about the recent thread or earlier proposal on the [e-mail] discussion list, too.

Peter

Comment 4

[Jens]

Thanks for considering. From a user perspective it looks like there's no `autocompletetype="cc-number"` equivalent for Sepa direct debit (or is `cc-number` so general to be used also for an IBAN.

> Jens, in addition to this feature request here, you can provide feedback about the recent thread or earlier proposal on the [e-mail] discussion list, too.

Not much I could add here (also I am not an expert). Florian Bender gets it all right imho, in particular:

> the IBAN, payer's name and BIC would be sent off through an encrypted connection.
> This is the way most merchants have already implemented it their shops
> today without making use of the Payment Request API.

(in fact, it would be even enough to just sent the IBAN and account name as the BIC can be deferred from the IBAN)

and 

> Consumer protection is achieved by granting consumers the unconditional right to reverse any Direct Debit on their bank
> account within eight weeks. Additionally, P(I)SPs acting on behalf of the merchant take care of all compliance issues 
> regarding Mandate generation and submission deadlines.

Interesintly, this is exactly like Stripe's recent SEPA integration is already working. Paymill is another example that works like this. I guess the one by BS PAYONE (for which Florian works) is all the same (there are many more like this). Even more interestingly, most (all?) payment providers like PayPal are effectively just "wrappers" around SEPA direct debit in Germany (Europe?). So whenever I pay with PayPal, then PayPal is just withdrawing money from my account via SEPA Direct Debit (and asking for a fee from the shop owner). 

So my point being is that most people simply use CC or PayPal because browser integration is so much better (password managers). Nobody is keen on remembering or typing in the SEPA number (22 digits).

As a user I was just surprised Credit Cards (albeit less used, way higher fees, less consumer friendly) having autofill and SEPA not (albeit more popular, better consumer protection, almost no fees; and it's the official payment method of the EU).

But, afaiu now, Firefox would first need to wait for an (upcoming) sepa payment standard before it could add autocomplete/autofill for IBAN/BIC/account name, right?

PS Let me just add, that you also use sepa when you go to supermarket and stuff, so it's really, really common in the face-to-face (non-digital) world too in Germany. You hand over your bank card, numbers are read and you sign to generate a mandate reference. All single payments, albeit in the digital world for e-commerce you also have subscriptions that work on recurring direct debit.

Comment 5

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

HTML spec issue: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/1448