Tag Archives: credit card processing

Wal-Mart Tests “Scan & Go” iPhone app

Keeping the Official Merchant Services blogs’ focus in the technology and mobile realm, today we take a look at the newest tech to be utilized by the retail giant Wal-Mart, which could potentially make the process of checking out more personal and faster.

Last week, Wal-Mart initiated testing of its new “Scan & Go” iPhone app in a Rogers, Arkansas supercenter near the company’s corporate headquarters. Employees who had Apple Inc. iPhones were among the first to be able to test out the new app and it’s features in store. The app allows customers to scan products as they shop and put them in bags in their carts. When it comes time to check out, the app transfers the scanned items to the self-checkout kiosk and the customer pays with conventional means (cash, check, or credit card).

The app does not allow users to pay on their phones yet. However, we recently reported here that Wal-Mart had joined forces with other large retailers to begin creating a retailer-focused mobile wallet app called Merchant Customer Exchange, or MCX. I expect to see some sort of integration between the “Scan & Go” app and the finished MCX product after it is unveiled.

The new system intends to skirt long lines at the retailers’ checkout counters, a widely held complaint of Wal-Mart shoppers. Customers have even taken to Twitter to vent frustrations at times. The push to eliminate the need for cashiers and baggers could save Wal-Mart millions of dollars, said Chief Financial Officer Charles Holley. The company spends about $12 million dollars in cashier wages every second at its U.S. Wal-Mart stores.

Wal-Mart’s iPhone app already includes functions such as letting shoppers create lists and seeing which items are in stock. Spokesman David Tovar said of the program, “We’re continually testing new and innovative ways to serve customers and enhance the shopping experience in our stores.”

This test comes as many retailers attempt new ways to speed up the checkout process and become innovators. Wal-Mart declined to give details on where the test might lead, but it doesn’t seem a far leap to other mobile phone platforms (Android and Blackberry) as well as mobile payment options in the future.

Industry Terms: NABU Fee

This is the latest installment in The Official Merchant Services Blog’s Knowledge Base effort. Well we want to make the payment processing industry’s terms and buzzwords clear. We want to remove any and all confusion merchants might have about how the industry works. Host Merchant Services promises: the company delivers personal service and clarity. So we’re going to take some time to explain how everything works. This ongoing series is where we define industry related terms and slowly build up a knowledge base and as we get more and more of these completed, we’ll collect them in our resource archive for quick and easy access. Today’s term is Network Access and Brand Usage (NABU) Fee. We chose this today because of all of the recent changes to Interchange fees released by the major credit card companies.

Network Access and Brand Usage Fee

The Network Access and Brand Usage (NABU) fee was created by MasterCard in 2009, and is fee imposed by MasterCard for all U.S. issued card transactions settled with MasterCard by a U.S. merchant. Effective January 8, 2012 MasterCard’s NABU fee was applied to authorization transactions instead of settlement transactions. MasterCard charges $0.0185 on all settle or refunded credit and signature debit card transactions for its Network Access Brand Usage fee. Revenue generated from the NABU fee goes directly to MasterCard. It is not collected by credit card processors or issuing banks.

MasterCard began charging the NABU fee is April of 2009. Prior to the $0.0185 charge, MasterCard assessed a $0.005 Acquirer Access Fee to transactions run through its network.

Since revenue from the NABU fee goes directly to MasterCard, most processors assess the fee to businesses at cost. However, in the case of tiered pricing the NABU fee is bundled with a business’s general qualified, mid-qualified and non-qualified rates. Although uncommon, it is possible for processors to markup the NABU fee even for businesses that are billed via more transparent interchange plus pricing.

To avoid confusion, the NABU fee is NOT related to:

Host Merchant Services clarifies MasterCard's NABU Fee

Changes to Interchange Fees

Breaking News from The Official Merchant Services Blog: MasterCard and Discover have announced interchange increases and modifications to take effect October 2012. Specific association modifications such as these are beyond the control of payment processors like Host Merchant Services. They come directly from the big card associations themselves. These changes affect all merchant card processors and their customers, meaning these changes in fees and rates travel in a straight line from Visa, MasterCard and Discover to the merchants.

The Meat and Potatoes

MasterCard will be reducing the Consumer Debit rate from 1.64% + $0.16 to 1.60% + $0.15. MasterCard will increase the Small Ticket Debit rate from 1.30 + $0.02 to 1.30 + $0.03.

Discover Card will be enacting several changes to their PSL Public Services interchange fee programs. Rates will increase from 1.50% +$0.10 to 1.55% + $0.10. Discover PSL Card-Not-Present/E-Commerce Premium Plus will increase from 2.30% + $0.10 to 2.35% + $0.10. Discover will also increase Key Enter Premium Plus from 2.10% + $0.10 to 2.15% + $0.10.

Add These Fees to the Pile

These changes come on the heels of a series of changes we reported back in February. Visa’s new Fixed Acquirer Network Fee and Transaction Integrity Fee made all of the headlines back then, but MasterCard also implemented its new annual Acquirer License Fee. This fee took effect in July 2012. MasterCard also implemented a new annual Type III Third Party Processor (TPP) Registration Fee in July 2012.

MasterCard based these fees on a full year of 2011 volume for each merchant, and for 2012 only the fees are 50% of the total fee calculated — since they cover only half of the year. MasterCard passed these fees through on a pro-rata basis and all acquired MasterCard credit and signature debit volume was utilized to determine the annual volume for both programs. PIN debit volume was excluded.

MasterCard Worldwide Logo

The changes to Discover Card’s PSL Public Services interchange fee programs are also in addition to a series of changes Discover announced back in February. Discover introduced a US Commercial Large Ticket Interchange program, increasing its assessment fee by .005%. Discover also changed existing card present Interchange rates for transactions less than $15 for Express Service merchants (Local Commuter, Bus Lines, Toll & Bridge Fees, Restaurants, Fast Food Restaurants, News/Dealer Stands, Laundries, Dry Cleaners, Quick Copy & Reproductions, Parking Lots/Garages, Car Washes, Motion Picture Theaters and Video Entertainment Rentals) and less than $25 for Taxi/Limo merchants.

Pay Attention to Your Statement

As stated above, these changes are made directly to Interchange rates from the Card Associations. Unlike Visa’s much ballyhooed FANF, which is a completely new fee and not subject to regulation from the Durbin Amendment, these fees fall under the scope and purview of Interchange, and thus Durbin.

Merchants will begin to see the following text on their August Statements to explain the changing fees:

Visa, MasterCard, Discover Card Services have announced category introductions and modifications to their current interchange structures. These changes may affect your current pricing effective October 2012. Further detail specific to these changes and impacts to your merchant account will be detailed on your September merchant statement. As previously disclosed on your February and March merchant statements, MasterCard introduced the new MC licensing fee. Beginning in August 2012, the new licensing fee of $.005 will be included with the MasterCard NABU billing and appear as “MC assoc NABU/license fee”. Thank you for your continued business.

The Future of PCI and Data Security

Today The Official Merchant Services Blog marks the triumphant return to the timely topic of PCI DSS and cardholder data security. This tantalizing topic has been touted time and again in the peerless pages of our payment processing chronicles.

Days of Future Past

The crafty criminals that defraud, hack and swipe courageous consumers for their cardholder data are a constant concern for the entire credit card processing and data security sector. The industry has to be ever vigilant in its commitment to curb the high tech criminal activities and keep that cardholder data safe.

Retailers need to be eagle-eyed when it comes to defending data and securing customer information. They also need to be prepared for disaster, with a protocol-based plan of action for the worst case scenario — the dreaded data breach. But none of these advance preparations will save a merchant from data breach dangers if the merchant is unaware of PCI DSS, what it all means and what the requirements for PCI Compliance are.

The misdirection and misinformation out there about the process of PCI Compliance has led to complacency among many merchants. Face front true believers, we’ve even expressed the fantastic facts and figures to support merchant apathy regarding PCI Compliance in previous published purveyances of PCI related blogs.

The media gloms onto the gargantuan headlines of something as garish as a Global Payments data breach and the searing spotlight of data security dazzles the masses with the terrifying tidbits of these capricious crimes. But the nature of the crime has the danger spreading to small business merchants more and more frequently in the past few years. In fact, this article from Convenience Store Decisions, it is suggested that the heinous hackers and nefarious fraudsters are backing away from the big fish and targeting the smaller retailers with easier to breach defenses.

The CS Decisions scribe John Lofsock posits that one of the prime reasons for this shift can be pinpointed to an alteration in the criminals’ own dastardly demographics. Today’s hacker is becoming less the angst ridden, misunderstood teenager with whiz-bang keyboard and coding powers and turning into a far more treacherous group of villains. As the article puts it, “When hackers run up against businesses with sophisticated information technology and up-to-date security, they’ll turn to easier systems, including those of small non-profit agencies and family businesses.”

Datapocalypse Now

So what does a merchant do? The hale and hoary Host Merchant Services PCI Compliance pioneers readily suggest utilizing their very own PCI Compliance Initiative. PCI Compliance is a fantastic foundation for top notch transaction security. The superlative standards and powerful protocols set up by the powers that be on the PCI-DSS Council are a forceful first step any enterprising merchant needs to take to protect their data. This is why helpful Host Merchant Services offers a power-packed PCI Compliance Initiative that gets merchants quickly and seamlessly up to speed.

Add to that amazing Initiative the second step that Merchants can take to shore up their security: Host Merchant Services Data Breach Security Program. Click that link to download a PDF explaining the value-added service HMS provides its merchants that goes above and beyond just simple PCI Compliance and helps ensure a merchant’s peace of mind. This program offers data breach insurance.

The article from CS Decisions quotes Trinette Huber, of Sinclair Oil Corp. in Salt Lake City as saying “as a merchant, I can go through all the steps to do this and do it in good faith, and yet if I have a breach — which is entirely possible — the PCI council will say I wasn’t literally compliant.”

This is where breach insurance comes into play true believers. The Data Breach Insurance that cutting edge and customer-oriented companies like Host Merchant Services offers can curb the pernicious penalties that merchants face when a breach occurs. As we’ve stated time and again here on The Official Merchant Services Blog, security only begins with PCI Compliance. It’s a never-ending battle for safety, justice and the power of payment processing. Merchant Services providers need to work in conjunction with merchants to stay out in front of any and all security issues. And even then, disaster can occur, so a solid data security plan will have backup protocols like data breach insurance.

The CS Decisions article also quotes Huber as saying that PCI “is asking thousands of merchants to do something (the credit card companies) should be doing themselves. They should be fixing the magnetic stripe (in credit/debit cards) so it’s not something that can be easily stolen, instead of asking merchants to fix (the security issues) for them.”

That concern right there is why Visa has been pushing so hard for its EMV chip program with newer, more secure smartcards that have worked so well in Canada and Europe. Huber is noted in the article for describing the overbearing cost that the switch to EMV could entail for small business owners, as well as the fact that the EMV chips have been in place for decades and have already had data compromised before.

So if not EMV, Then What?

Will no canny crusader for competent credit card processing and dependable data transfer step up to take the challenge presented by the PCI DSS? John Lofsock, the audacious author of the article we’ve been analyzing, thinks that Point to Point Encryption (P2PE) might be the champion the industry needs. This tantalizing technology that is newer than EMV chips apparently ensures that credit card data is protected from the moment it is swiped all the way through to the nanosecond it arrives with the payment processor. This could curry favor with retailers because it completely eliminates the need for the retailer to secure cardholder data, as the retailer never has possession of said data.

The real boon, as noted by Lofsock, is that the P2PE method will make it much cheaper for merchants to be PCI Compliant by removing the need for merchants to deal with network segmentation and other costly and time-consuming parts of the compliance process like the audit.

It is noted that PCATS and PCI are preparing future standards that deal with P2PE so it is on their radar.

In the meantime, Host Merchant Services continues to offer the lowest PCI Compliance rates in the industry, as well as a vigorous PCI Compliance Initiative that seeks to inform and educate everyone interested as to the details of the process, step-by-step.

Discover Teams Up with PayPal [2023 Update]

The Official Merchant Services Blog continues to shine its spotlight of educational information directly on the Mobile Payments Industry. This bristling business sector keeps creating buzz among payment processing persons as well as overall economic assortments. One minute people are predicting hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue will get generated by consumers embracing the cashless society model and conveniently swiping their phones to pay for every little thing that catches their eye. The next minute people are predicting U.S. consumers are too wary and cautious and not ready to expose their information to the cloud and the criminals trying to crack their way into that cloud.

This titanic tug-of-war between “the next big thing” that economic analysts desperately desire M-Payments to become and the “hold your horses hombre” caution that those same analysts caveat the slow acceptance in U.S. markets has been defining the media coverage of the Mobile Wallet Madness for more than a year. But the potential for prodigious profits has pushed the possibilities of mobile payment processing through the morass of misgivings.

Merchants United!

As we purposely pointed out to our peerless readers just mere days ago, the Merchant Customer Exchange was formed. This epic assemblage of retail industry giants teams Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Best Buy Co. and Target Corp, 7-Eleven Inc., Alon Brands Inc., CVS Caremark Corp., Darden Restaurants Inc., Lowes Co., Sunoco Inc., Sears Holding Corp. and the Publix Supermarket chains into a mega-group of retail merchant might on a mobile wallet mission.

Coming on the heels of Visa’s saturation of the 2012 London Olympics with all things Mobile and all things Visa, the mighty mingling of the MCX merchants applied unforeseen amounts of pressure on the mobile payment marketplace.

Mobile Payment Paring: Discover and PayPal

On August 22 PayPal, owned by eBay, announced a deal with Discover Financial Services to bring PayPal access to the 7 million merchants in Discover’s network. This deal will begin in the second quarter of 2013 and the announcement was made a mere two weeks after Square partnered up with Starbucks to let customers pay with Square’s app at the 7,000 U.S. Starbucks locations.

Excelsior! Retail titans are teaming up with mobile gadgeteers in one mass scramble to make it to market before the U.S. consumer becomes firmly affixed on the easiest and most widespread brand — as is wont to happen with U.S. shopper market behavior.

The PayPal deal is a particular point of note because PayPal itself is pushing from the online marketplace back into the physical realm of brick and mortar. This may indeed help bridge the gap from e-commerce to old fashioned commerce, and that bifrost of payment processing could very well buttress mobile payment processing in a brave new world of cashles-sness and contactless transactions.

The super-powered pairing of Discover and PayPal drove stock prices for each company, with Discover gaining 3.9% and eBay gaining 2.5% on the market the day the announcement was made. This arrangement will greatly accelerate PayPal’s in-store payment efforts. By riding on Discover’s network, PayPal can get into more locations and get there quickly. Best of all this movement doesn’t requiring any significant integration work by merchants. That potentially puts PayPal at a big advantage against rival mobile payment systems such as Google Wallet, Isis, and Square.

Discover is integrating PayPal’s payment system into its software, which will be uploaded to millions of point-of-sale terminals that support Discover Card payments. PayPal’s branding and rules will be presented to consumers who choose to pay in store with PayPal. PayPal currently has more than 50 million U.S. customers who will be able to take advantage of in-store payments.

Mega Retailers Jump into Mobile Wallets [2023 Update]

Today the Official Merchant Services Blog will continue with our Mobile Commerce theme. A group of 14 Major U.S. Retailers recently announced that they have decided to join forces and create their own mobile wallet application. The group, which includes Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Best Buy Co. and Target Corp., will call itself Merchant Customer Exchange, or MCX.

MCX has no official launch date as of today, but the merchants are determined to jump head first into the expanding mobile payments market. The network of merchants also includes 7-Eleven Inc., Alon Brands Inc., CVS Caremark Corp., Darden Restaurants Inc., Lowes Co., Sunoco Inc., Sears Holding Corp. and the Publix Supermarket chains.

Merchant Customer Exchange

MCX seeks to corner a piece of the mobile payments market, expected to balloon from $172 billion this year to $600 billion by 2016. The new merchant super group plans on offering a mobile-commerce solution capable of seamlessly integrating a wide range of consumer offers, promotions and retail programs. The application will be available through virtually any smart phone.

This move comes about a week after Starbucks announced partnering with Square, a mobile processing start-up that uses smart phone attachments to accept credit cards. Now MCX will not only compete with Square, it has taken away 14 potential partners from the processor. MCX is also bad news for Google, which has been expanding its own mobile wallet platform, called Google Wallet over the past year. Google Wallet uses NFC, or near field communication to transmit payment data from a customers smart phone to an NFC-enabled payment terminal.

Mega-Merchants

With these mega retailers coming together, a new perspective can be used to develop mobile wallet apps. The retailers want to focus on ease of use and security for the consumer.

“As merchants, no one understands our customers’ shopping and payment experience better than we do, and we’re confident that together we can develop a technology solution that makes that experience more engaging, convenient and efficient,” said Mark Williams, president of financial services at Best Buy.

Mike Cook, corporate vice president and assistant treasurer of Wal-Mart said, “the MCX platform will employ secure technology to deliver an efficiency-enhancing mobile solution available to all merchant categories, including retail stores, casual dining, petroleum and e-commerce.”

Now with many more contenders in the mobile commerce arena, the only thing consumers can do is wait for the dust to settle. The great race to mobile wallet supremacy has begun!Host Merchant Services will keep you up to date on all new technology developments and potential partnerships relating to the mobile payments world.

Olympic Payments: Cash Takes Gold

Today the Official Merchant Services Blog will take a look at the role Mobile Payments played in the 2012 London Olympic Games.

Visa, the official Payment Payment provider of the Olympics pushed for Mobile Payment Technology as a safe and convenient payment option for consumers throughout the London games. Jim McCarthy, Head of Products at Visa Inc., said “This summer we will be demonstrating the future of payments in London – a future where most consumers will rely on mobile devices, tablets and PCs to manage their daily financial lives.”

As a part of Visa’s Olympics marketing push for the future of Mobile, a limited edition Samsung Galaxy S III was provided to some Visa sponsored athletes and trialists. The device featured an Olympic-branded version of Visa’s mobile payment application, Visa payWave which uses Near Field Communication technology, or NFC. To make purchases, consumers simply needed to select the Visa icon on the Samsung device and hold the phone to a contactless payment terminal to pay.

It seemed as though Visa had all the pieces in place to make this Olympics a Mobile Payments success; a dominant payment network, including Visa only ATMs positioned throughout the games, NFC-enabled vendors able to take the mobile payments, and spectators with smart phones who could pay via mobile. The only problem was competing against an Olympic veteran of every games, cash.

During Great Britain’s Men’s Soccer match versus the United Arab Emirates, spectators were unable to pay for food and drinks at Wembley Stadium by credit card or mobile payment after terminals went down. Many ticket holders described the lines that subsequently built up as ridiculous and said a lack of cash machines at the west London ground added to the problem.

A spokesman for Visa was quick to point the finger at Wembley officials, placing the blame firmly on the stadium’s network infrastructure saying, “We understand that Wembley’s systems failed and therefore they were only accepting cash at the food and beverage kiosks.”

Twitter was bombarded with thousands of angry posts from people who found it completely unacceptable that they couldn’t feed themselves. This was due to the fact that the only available way to pay was with old-fashioned cash and coins, a means of payments Visa wanted to push away from with its mobile payment implementation.

In these games, mobile payments did not expand as much as Visa had anticipated. Add that to the complete network failure at Wembley Stadium and it would seem that mobile payments were a flop at this year’s Olympic Games. The silver lining however, is that mobile payments did have a huge presence at the games. And the uproar caused by the network failure seems to prove that we are moving away from cash as a society. Just a few years ago, credit card terminals going down at the Olympics might not have been such a big story, let alone a trending topic on Twitter. It seems for the London Olympic Games, cash took the gold medal yet again in payments, but with the doubling of Mobile users here in the U.S. and the increase globally; cash may soon be unseated by mobile payments.

Industry Terms: Discount Rate

Discount Rate

The simple definition of the term Discount Rate as it applies to merchant accounts — it is a combination of the fees charged by the card acquirer to the merchant for processing payment card transactions. So what that’s really saying is the Discount Rate is what the payment processor charges the merchant so that they can make profit off of the transaction — it’s not really a discount in any sense of the word when defined like that.

So let’s break this down a little more to understand this buzzword beyond just the obvious. A Merchant Account has a variety of fees. Some of these fees are charged periodically, such as a monthly service fee. Others can be charged on a per-item or percentage basis, such as a Chargeback Fee. Some fees are set by the merchant account provider.

The majority of the per-item and percentage fees, however, are passed through the merchant account provider to the credit card issuing bank according to a schedule of rates called interchange fees, which are set by Visa, Discover, and Mastercard.

Each merchant services provider has real costs in addition to the wholesale interchange fees, and creates profit by adding a mark-up to all the fees they have to take on to provide their services in the first place. The discount rate comprises the combination of dues, fees, assessments, network charges and that additional mark-up merchants are required to pay for accepting credit and debit cards. The largest of these fees by far is the Interchange fee.

There are a number of pricing models that merchant services providers utilize, but Host Merchant Services uses the Interchange Plus pricing plan.

Interchange Plus pricing means that the acquirer charges you a variable MSC consisting of the cost price plus a fixed markup. Interchange Plus Pricing is exclusively how we quote at Host Merchant Services. Interchange Plus, also known as Cost Plus, pricing gives the customer a fixed rate over published Interchange Fees. This pricing format is normally quoted as a discount rate (percentage fee) along with a per item or authorization fee. The great thing about Interchange Plus pricing is that you always know exactly what you are paying to your processor to services your account. Think of Interchange, and all the associated fees, as an unavoidable cost. No matter who you process with, you have to pay these fees. They may be labeled differently, or wrapped up in a confusing pricing tier, but one way or the other, you are paying Interchange fees. By understanding the markup you pay over Interchange, you know exactly what you pay to your processor and exactly what is going to the card associations. That allows you to make a decision on whether or not the markup seems reasonable for the service you get and choose your processing partner accordingly.

Here’s a small graphic explaining the basics of how Interchange Plus works.

Industry Terms: Payment Gateway

This is the latest installment in The Official Merchant Services Blog’s Knowledge Base effort. We want to make the payment processing industry’s terms and buzzwords clear. We will eliminate any and all confusion merchants might have about how the industry works. At Host Merchant Services, we promise to deliver personal service and clarity. So we’re going to take some time to explain how everything works. This ongoing series is where we define industry related terms and slowly build up a knowledge base and as we get more and more of these completed, we’ll collect them in the resource archive for quick and easy access.

Payment Gateway

Today we will focus on Payment Gateways and how they work, in order to wrap up our week of E-commerce driven content. A payment gateway allows E-commerce merchants to accept credit cards on their websites. Sensitive payment information is encrypted by the gateway to ensure that it passes securely between the customer and the merchant. We have defined a POS, or point of sale system already for the Knowledge Base. A payment gateway can be considered a virtual point of sale system. The gateway acts as a “middle man,” allowing communication between online shopping carts or virtual terminals and the banks processing the transaction.

The process can be broken down like this, it starts when a customer places an order on a website by pressing the “Submit Order” button in an online shopping cart. The payment gateway then forwards the transaction information to the payment processor used by the merchant’s acquiring bank. From there the payment processor forwards that information to the appropriate card association (ex Visa, MasterCard). The credit card issuing bank receives the request, or the Authorization and does the necessary credit or debit check and then sends a response back to the processor in the form of an approval code (ex approved, denied). Next the processor forwards the authorization response back to the payment gateway. After receiving the response, the gateway forwards it on to the website, which then evaluates it as a relevant response and relays the outcome to the merchant and cardholder. Finally, the merchant then fulfills the customers order, then after a batch the acquiring bank receives the funds, and deposits them into the merchants bank account.

Payment gateways can be stand-alone systems designed for integration with other 3^rd party systems, or they can be bundled with their own shopping carts and virtual terminals. It’s worth noting that most merchants will not need to install additional software on their own servers to run a basic payment gateway. Some payment gateway providers are simple to implement, but do not offer much customization. Others are more complex but can be customized to your needs.

Host Merchant Services offers a variety of E-commerce solutions to fit your business, including Transaction Central, our own cutting edge in house payment gateway. HMS is able to interface with most of the major Payment Gateways out there, including Authorize.net. We also offer unparalleled protection for all of our merchants in the form of our PCI Compliance Initiative.

Industry Terms: CVV

This is the latest installment in The Official Merchant Services Blog’s Knowledge Base effort. We want to make the payment processing industry’s terms and buzzwords clear. We will eliminate any and all confusion merchants might have about how the industry works. At Host Merchant Services, we promise to deliver personal service and clarity. So we’re going to take some time to explain how everything works. This ongoing series is where we define industry related terms and slowly build up a knowledge base and as we get more and more of these completed, we’ll collect them in the resource archive for quick and easy access.

Card Verification Value (CVV)

In continuing with our E-Commerce focused blogs this week, I thought it would be appropriate to introduce the term Card Verification Value, or CVV. There are two types of CVV codes, called CVV1 and 2, respectively. The CVV1 is embedded in the magnetic stripe of track 2 of a card. The purpose of the first CVV is to verify data stored on a card is valid and was issued by a bank when used in person.

The second and more prominent CVV2 is a three-digit code (Visa, MasterCard) printed on the back of credit and debit cards. American Express cards have a ‘Unique card code’ that is four-digits long and printed on the front. Discover has a 3-digit code on the back of its cards, but refers to this as a CID (Card Identification Number). These codes are used in card not present transactions occurring over the Internet, or MOTO as an added security feature to prevent fraudulent purchases. The code is meant to verify that the customer has the card in their possession.

Security Benefits

For Merchants:

Merchants requiring CVV2 codes for their card not present transactions can dramatically reduce fraud in their businesses. Using this extra layer of protection can stop breached or fraudulent cards from going through. Avoiding potential retrievals and chargeback fees.

For Consumers:

Entering your CVV2 code when purchasing online products verifies that you are who you say you are. Under Visa regulations, merchants cannot store CVV2 codes in their databases. This means any card numbers lost in a breach would be less useful. In this sense, a consumer is protected on both sides of a transaction, once when verifying the purchase, and then again in terms of breach or fraud security.