When a customer is saving a payment method for future billing, such as saving those details as part of a payment process or updating the payment method for a membership, they may be presented with a request to authorise £0 by their bank or see their future billing as 'Free' when using Apple Pay. This is completely normal and is a by-product of the way these processes are presented by banks and Apple.
Authorise a £0 transaction with the bank (card payments)
When a customer asks Gymcatch to save their card details, authorisation may be required by their bank in order to do so to allow us to raise future payment requests against those details. If they are saving card details during a payment, processors generally handle this as 2 separate actions as part of a wider flow. The first action is to ask permission to save the card to the payment processor (eg. GymcatchPay or Stripe) and the payment is then handled as a separate, second step for the processor to charge the card. Because the first action has no payment attached and is just to save the card's details, instead of telling the customer that they are being asked to save the card, the bank's authorisation screen will just ask the client to approve a £0 transaction. Once they have approved the saving of the card details, Gymcatch will then proceed to charge that saved card for the expected amount of the transaction. As your customer has just authorised the use of their card for future billing, they will usually not be asked to then provide authorisation again for the specific payment.
Future Billing: Free (Apple Pay)
Similar to card payments above, if your customer is setting Apple Pay as the payment method for future billing on a membership, Gymcatch asks for permission to save their Apple Pay preference for the future. At this point, there is no actual charge amount specified for future billing so the Apple Pay confirmation screen will show them the amount that they will pay straight away (if any) and then also confirm that they are allowing future payments via Apple Pay with the display 'Future Billing: Free'. As with the £0 authorisation, this just means that the customer is granting permission for future payments to be processed via Apple Pay but no actual amount or schedule is being set here. All future billing requests are handled by an internal Gymcatch billing process.
We will continue to lobby for an improved display to customers but this is outside of our control.
In summary, a request to authorise £0 or seeing future billing as 'Free' is perfectly normal and expected behaviour when saving payment details for future billing.