What's RBI's e-mandate and how is it affecting your ads? 


Reserve Bank of India has revised its guidelines on automatic recurring payments by introducing an Additional Factor of Authentication (AFA). All the payments beyond a sum of Rs. 5000 are now supposed to get authenticated via an AFA like OTP. Now the banks are required to notify the customers about the payment, 24 hours prior to the payment. Due to this, the standing orders on the cards can also not be processed. For cards expiring at or before the end of the month, the standing orders shall expire too. 

This is causing payment failures and temporary account disablements in Facebook and Google.


What are the resolutions?

Facebook: 

Facebook has come up with a prepaid model option that will allow you to make manual payments or add funds to the ad account to spend as per the budget. The Facebook account will be moved to the prepaid model automatically by the end of this month. This can be done by using credit cards, UPI, net banking or Paytm. 

The ads will continue to run with no change in amount spending. Facebook will deduct these funds daily to pay for the ads. You can keep adding more funds to your account using the steps below: 

1. Go to the ads manager. 
2. Go to the billing. 

3. Click on 'add funds' to add funds to the ad account. 


In case the account has not been moved to the prepaid model yet, you can get in touch with the Facebook chat support using the link here to escalate the same. The campaigns will generally get paused for the next 48 hours for a smooth transition. You'll be able to resume them once the account gets moved to the prepaid model. 


Google: 

Google has made two changes: From 30th September 2021, the threshold of 25k will be lowered to 5k, due to this, you might encounter some errors. 

To avoid any service interruptions, sign in to your Google Ads account using the instructions below to enable automatic payments. 

  1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
  2. Click Fix Now in the Red Alert (if any) at the top of the page to fix your recurring payments and prevent service disruption.


If your account has stopped running due to a decline of your automatic payment, follow the steps below:

  1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
  2. Click the tools icon and then under "Billing" choose Summary.
  3. Click Make a payment.
  4. Complete the flow and pay for your owed amount (or more than your owed amount if you’d like) manually.
  5. Click Payment Methods.
  6. Look for your primary card and check if there's a "Fix" option link below it. If so, click Fix.
  7. Check to make sure that all the card details are correct and click Update.

Here is where the role of adding a backup payment method comes into the picture, even if the primary payment method gets declined, the ads will continue running uninterruptedly.