Identify payment card details

The card schemes or card networks are large multinational organizations that specialize in building and managing the infrastructure needed for supporting payments with credit cards. Corporations such as the VISA network and MasterCard are some of the largest card schemes in the world. Those corporations regulate most aspects of issuing and using bank payment cards.

The Payment Card Identification Directory service can help you identify which network issued a card by matchng the first six digits of it's number.

By looking up the IIN (Issuer Identification Number) in the directory, you can also identify from which country the card is issued.

By identifying the issuing bank name, you can often identify special types of cards such as co-branded cards and cards issued under bin sponsorship

The two main types of bank cards are Credit Cards and Debit Cards.
As the name suggests credit cards provide their holder with a line of credit which must be paid off.

Debit cards are linked to a bank account and can only make payments as long as there is a positive balance in the customer's bank account.
The data inside the PCI Directory also allows for differentiating between debit or credit card recognition

The PCI Directory allows our clients to determine if a card is Consumer or Commercial card. Differentiating consumer from commercial cards provides a valuable insight into the type of customer. This marker is very useful in fraud and payment risk assessment as a scoring factor. Payment Card levels describes important categories of bank cards based on spending limits and annual fees.

Additional card category markers allow Prepaid Cards Detection ( also useful in anti-fraud applicaitons )

For more information on Prepaid Card types and their implications, please visit the Prepaid Cards section