(AVS) and IntelliPay AVS Transaction Controls

The Address Verification System (AVS) is used to help prevent fraudulent credit card use and is provided as a service by the card associations. It is built into IntelliPay and all your credit card transaction requests will be automatically run through AVS.

The AVS system compares the Billing Address entered by your customer to the address information your customer has on file with his credit card issuer. The system compares the numerical portion of the street address and the zip code. When the transaction request returns an AVS code comes back with the authorization code.

AVS is intended to help prevent fraud on the premise that someone using stolen credit cards may not have the cardholder’s address information and will be detected. This is often true and AVS is a valuable addition to help merchants. However, merchants should also realize that sometimes fraudsters have the correct address information, and that Americans move their households and may not have updated their addresses yet with their banks.

While AVS is not bullet-proof, it still provides a layer of information to help merchants make better decisions about accepting certain credit card purchases.

Notes About AVS Usage

• AVS is intended for use on all “card not present” or “cardholder not present” transactions. This means if your customer and her card are not standing in front of you, then you must run AVS. Generally, this also means you have a type of merchant account called “Mail Order – Telephone Order” (MOTO). MOTO accounts are required to run AVS to fit the lowest fee requirements called “Qualified Rates”.Without an AVS score, the transaction will fit under one of your merchant account’s definitions of “Non-Qualified Rates” and you’ll be charged a higher discount rate on that transaction. Usually this is 1% or more. Read our report “About Merchant Accounts” and also read your merchant agreement from your merchant account provider for details on Non-Qual charges.When a transaction does not fit the “Qualified Rate” definitions, the credit card industry says that that transaction has been “downgraded”.

  When the address information sent by your customer fails to match the data on file, this is called an “AVS mis-match”.

• At this time the card associations have only implemented the AVS system for U.S.-based credit cards therefore any credit card purchase from outside the U.S. will not receive an AVS score, and those transactions will be downgraded.
• You must send the Bill-To information to IntelliPay in your LinkSmart or ExpertLink data, or if IntelliPay is serving secure payment pages for you, be sure that the address fields are marked “Required” and “Editable” in order to have our system force collection of that data. ExpertLink merchants must send this data in order to avoid downgrades where possible.
• If you are building data collection, shopping cart or payment pages for your web site, be sure to provide fields to collect these data, and it helps to remind your customers that the “Bill-To” information must match what’s on file with their credit card bank.
• An authorization request will not be automatically declined based on AVS scores. Therefore you can get an approval with an AVS mis-match. This leaves you to decide what to do.

How IntelliPay Helps You Automate Some AVS Business Rules

Since Internet transactions can happen any time you will probably not be monitoring each transaction. To help, IntelliPay has developed tools that LinkSmart and ExpertLink merchants can use to automate IntelliPay transaction-level behaviors based on AVS responses. These tools give you powerful, real-time control over what happens with each credit card authorization request.

These two tools are the HTML tags “REJECTAVSMISMATCH” and “REJECTIFAVSNOT”. With these two real-time tools you can dictate whether IntelliPay rejects transactions based on acceptable AVS responses that you configure. You can either send us the same tag settings with every request, or build a custom system on your side that varies your AVS requirements based on the product, package, service or “member”, or any other need you may have.

You may decide to reject all non-U.S. card attempts, AVS mis-matches for a certain sale you’re having and more. This can be very powerful for you.

AVS Response Codes

The AVS response code you receive can vary depending on what data you are passing to IntelliPay to be processed. We recommend at the minimum level of AVS protection the values X and Y should be entered into the allowed values for “Reject if not”. The list below shows all possible response codes and their meanings:

Valid AVS response codes

X – Exact match (nine-digit zip and address).

Y – Address and five-digit zip match.

M – Exact match (postal code and address) for international transaction.

D – Exact match (postal code and address) for international transaction.

F – Street address and postal codes match for international transaction (U.K. Only)

A – Address matches, ZIP does not.

W – Nine-digit zip match, address does not.

Z – Five-digit zip matches, address does not.

P – Postal code only match on international transaction.

B – Street address match for international transaction, postal code not verified.

N – Address and ZIP code do not match.

U – Address information unavailable, unable to verify.

R – Retry, system unavailable or timed out.

S – Card does not support AVS.

E – Ineligible transaction.

G – Non U.S. Issuer does not participate.

0 (Zero) – AVS not available.

C –Street address and postal code not verified for international transaction.

I – Address information not verified for international transaction.

Please Note: If your processor is FDC you can possibly receive up to a 3 letter response, the AVS value to check against is in the last character (example: AVSDATA=YYZ in this case you would check against the Z even though the first 2 characters are valid responses).

To verify what processor you are using, follow the directions below:

1. Log in to your IntelliPay account by going to https://www.intellipay.net/Merchant/ and enter in your Login Name and Password.
2. Click on the “Go” button to access the section of “Edit Configuration”.
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will see the section of “Processing Information”.
4. The name of your processor is located where it says “Processor Name”.

Using IntelliPay’s Internal AVS Controls

Once logged into your IntelliPay account you can configure your AVS settings to Approve or Decline any transaction based upon the AVS repsonse that is returned by the Credit Card issuing bank. To configure these settings you will first need to know which response you can expect from the IntelliPay gateway. Click here to obtain a list of possible AVS responses. After you have determined what AVS response codes you want to allow, follow the directions below to configure your Internal AVS Controls.

1. Login to your IntelliPay account.
2. Click on the “Go” button to access the section of “Edit Configuration”.
3. Scroll down to the section of “LinkSmart Options”.
4. You will now see settings that look like this:

5. If you want to enable the AVS checking, check the checkbox to the right of “Reject if AVS mismatch”.
6. Enter in the AVS codes you want to allow in the text field to the right of “Reject if not”.
7. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the “Submit Configuration” button.

What this will now do is check the AVS response and either approve or decline each individual transaction based upon the values that you have entered.

Using LinkSmart and Expertlink to control IntelliPay’s AVS Rules

REJECTAVSMISMATCH

This tag acts as a switch telling the IntelliPay gateway to decline the transaction if the values defined in the REJECTIFAVSNOT tag are not returned.

Typically sent as a Hidden field: <INPUT TYPE=”hidden” NAME=”REJECTAVSMISMATCH” VALUE=”Y”>.

Note: that the values for NAME and VALUE are case sensitive.

REJECTIFAVSNOT

This tag tells IntelliPay to reject (decline) a transaction where the AVS response does not match any of the values sent in the tag’s VALUE. You tell us what AVS scores you want for this transaction and we’ll decline all others.

Also sent as a Hidden field: <INPUT TYPE=”hidden” NAME=”REJECTIFAVSNOT” VALUE=”AWXYZ”>

The VALUE can contain any combination of AVS codes and the example above is just for illustration. Remember you’re defining AVS scores that you want to approve.

Note: You will also need to send this named value pair, <INPUT TYPE=”hidden” NAME=”REJECTAVSMISMATCH” VALUE=”Y”>. This acts as a switch telling the IntelliPay gateway to decline the transaction if the values defined in REJECTIFAVSNOT are not returned.

Please Note: If you configure your Internal AVS Controls within your “Edit Configuration” any response code that matches what you are passing via LinkSmart or ExpertLink will also be checked against the Internal AVS controls. IntelliPay recommends that if you are using LinkSmart or ExpertLink exclusivly then you should not configure your Internal AVS Controls.

Example: You have configured the “Reject If Not” values within the Internal AVS controls to: “AWXY” then within your ExpertLink code you pass the “REJECTIFAVSNOT” tag and set the value to: “AWXYZ”. If you submit a transaction that returns the AVS value of “Z” then the transaction will be declined as “Z” is the only value that you are not allowing through ExpertLink or through the AVS Controls combined.

Summary

Today AVS is a vital and integral part of accepting credit card payments on the Internet. Learning how to use them in your business is part of your risk management procedures, and IntelliPay’s proprietary AVS Transaction Control Tools are very powerful ways for you to control transactions based on AVS scores.