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Credit Card
CVV and CVV2 values are often confused by cardholders. CVV is printed on the magnetic stripe and used for card verification when the card is physically swiped through a POS; CVV2 is printed on the back of the card for e-commerce authorization.
Credit Card
A prepaid card may look like a debit card since it has no predetermined limit and purchases are limited to the amount loaded by the cardholder, but in terms of use and operating logic it differs significantly from both credit and debit cards.
Online & Authorization
These are codes that communicate the issuer's conditions for approving a transaction online (IAC-Online), for declining it (IAC-Denial), or for declining it when the terminal cannot go online (IAC-Default).
Online & Authorization
In EMV, data is stored in Tag-Length-Value (TLV) format, and it is carried between the card, the POS terminal, and the authorization system in this same format. This post lists every EMV Tag, its type, and its description.
Credit Card
You may have noticed that the same transaction amount earns different reward points when paid with a credit card. Have you ever wondered why? The points a card earns are managed within the card bank's authorization system.
Payment Systems
After Russia invaded Ukraine, Visa and Mastercard suspended services for sanctioned Russian banks. This post explains the impact on cardholders and merchants, and Russia's MIR and UnionPay alternatives.
Merchant & POS
Loyalty points are promotional rewards banks give customers for credit card transactions, tracked on a card/customer basis. Banks charge merchants a commission on POS transactions, and some share part of that commission with cardholders as points.
Chargeback
A good faith review request is a written request that issuers and acquirers send each other to collect on a transaction when the dispute (chargeback) process cannot be run. The requesting party states its grounds.
Credit Card
Track 1 is a special data set encoded on a card's magnetic stripe that contains the card information required for authorization when the card is used physically. It includes the cardholder name, card number, and expiration date.
Merchant & POS
AFL (Application File Locator) is the field that shows where on the card the data needed for the authorization transaction is located. AFL is a list of the application data records on the card, and the terminal uses it to read the application data.
Security
Published by the PCI SSC, Software-based PIN Entry on COTS (SPoC) is a standard that provides a software-based approach for protecting PIN entry on commercial off-the-shelf devices such as smartphones and tablets.
Credit Card
A 2-character field written to the card's chip data that increases by 1 with each card renewal, allowing authorization to distinguish between the old and new card. This means that, theoretically, assuming no other conditions prevent it, a...