Automatically collecting the card holders information
We don't and we can't.
When a customer taps a card, phone, or smartwatch (using Tap to Pay on iPhone/Android or a standard terminal), Stripe doesn't receive their contact details like name, email, or billing address.
This happens for a few specific technical, security, and privacy reasons:
1. The EMV Contactless Protocol Doesn't Send It
The global technology standard for contactless payments (called EMV / NFC) was designed specifically for financial clearance, not identity collection.
When a physical card or mobile wallet is tapped, the chip broadcasts only the essential payload needed to approve the money transfer:
- A tokenized (encrypted) account number
- The card's expiration date
- A one-time dynamic cryptogram (security code) generated specifically for that single tap
Contact details like Email Addresses and Phone Numbers are never stored on a credit card's chip or inside Apple Pay/Google Pay tokens. They physically do not exist in the data payload being transmitted via NFC.
2. Apple Pay & Google Pay Privacy Barriers
When someone taps using a smartphone or watch, Apple Pay and Google Pay intentionally act as a privacy shield.
Their strict privacy model guarantees to the consumer that tapping their device at a store will not silently broadcast their personal contact information or identity to the merchant or payment gateway. The bank authorizes the transaction, but Apple and Google deliberately strip out personal identifiers.
3. Cardholder Names Are Often Stripped or Absent
Even for physical contactless cards, industry best practices for chip technology intentionally omit the cardholder's name from the radio-frequency broadcast to prevent malicious actors with RFID scanners from "skimming" people's real names out of their pockets in crowded spaces.
As Stripe specifically notes in their developer documentation regarding Tap to Pay:
"The cardholder name is typically not available on contactless payments."
Summary
Tap to Pay is fundamentally an anonymous, low-friction payment rail. Because the NFC chip payload only carries encrypted banking data, Stripe receives proof that the bank approved the funds, but zero contact details—which is why systems relying on Tap to Pay need an "Anonymous Constituent" account in Tessitura to assign the orphaned orders to!