Most PESA memberships are annual memberships. This means that after twelve months they need to be renewed or you will lose your membership benefits. If your current membership lapses, you may have to pay the new members’ joining processing fee once again to re-join.
Viewing your membership status
Your active subscriptions are listed under the Active Subscriptions heading on your account dashboard page:
If you cannot see any active subscriptions, visit the Subscriptions tab in your account dashboard page to view all your subscriptions, including expired ones:
Automatically Renewing Your Membership
To ensure your membership gets renewed on time, you will want to have your subscription enabled.
This means that on the indicated next billing date, your credit card will get automatically debited with the amount shown.
The example on the left shows a membership that will automatically be renewed on the 19th of December 2020.
If your subscription status indicates “Paused”, click on the “Enable Auto-Renewal” button in the Actions column to enable automatic renewal of your membership on the expiry date indicated.
In the following example, pressing “Enable Auto-Renewal” will enable automatic renewal of the membership on the date the current membership will be expiring. In the example, this will be on the 19th of December 2020:
After clicking on the “Enable Auto-Renewal” button, the status will change to the following:
Updating your payment details
If your credit card details have changed, you can update them at any time by clicking on the “Update Credit Card” button in the “Actions” column.
Note that we do not store any credit card information. All credit card details are securely held by our credit card payment gateway provider, Stripe.
See also our section “Why this is safe” further down on this page.
Disabling Automatic Renewal of your Membership
To disable automatic renewal of your membership, press the “”Disable Auto-Renewal” button in the “Actions” column,
If your subscription column says “Paused”, then your membership will NOT be automatically renewed.
You may then have to manually re-join via the Memberships page when your membership expires and fill in your details again and pay the joining processing fee.
Why This Is Safe
Stripe is a global credit card payment gateway provider and has local offices in 36 countries all over the world. Here is a link to the official Stripe security page: https://stripe.com/docs/security/stripe
In particular, these parts may assist:
Stripe has been audited by a PCI-certified auditor and is certified to PCI Service Provider Level 1. This is the most stringent level of certification available in the payments industry. To accomplish this, we make use of best-in-class security tools and practices to maintain a high level of security at Stripe.
Encryption of sensitive data and communication
All card numbers are encrypted at rest with AES-256. Decryption keys are stored on separate machines. None of Stripe’s internal servers and daemons are able to obtain plaintext card numbers; instead, they can just request that cards be sent to a service provider on a static whitelist. Stripe’s infrastructure for storing, decrypting, and transmitting card numbers runs in separate hosting infrastructure, and doesn’t share any credentials with Stripe’s primary services (API, website, etc.).
Why we offer automatic renewals
Membership subscriptions with automatic renewal benefit both the society and its members to reduce both effort and costs for both sides.
We wanted to make it convenient for members to renew and retain the renewal pricing, rather than go through an approval process each year, or have their membership expire on the 1st of January, no matter when they subscribed during the year.
Automatic renewals would of course be impossible without a secure, reputable payment gateway provider. All members on auto-renewal will receive automatic emails reminding them well in advance of their renewal being processed, so that you will never be taken by surprise and can choose to not renew when the time comes.
So as described above, your credit card details are not accessible, whether you opt in or opt out of auto-renewal for your membership. Knowing the expiry date of your card is not an indicator of us knowing your card details.
Any renewing service needs to know when a credit card is set to expire, so it can remind the user prior to a renewal to update their card details. But that is very different from knowing your actual credit card details.
In other words, nothing is stored on our systems other than a secure, encrypted token, and Stripe cannot access or view the details directly, either (see explanation above).
This is exactly the same system as any other online subscription services use (including auto-billing for things like online magazines, your mobile phone plan, internet service, energy utility and online stores) that offer to remember your payment details.
In closing, there certainly is always a risk whenever you use a credit card, particularly online. For example, your computer may have been hacked and a third party is watching as you type in your credit card on a website.
If you are concerned, we would suggest using a secondary credit card with a low limit or a prepaid debit card. That way you can get the convenience of online transactions without the concern.