PIN Debit

Customers commonly use debit cards, also called ATM cards or check cards, in card-present situations. Your agreement with the debit networks determines whether the customer must provide a personal identification number (PIN).

supports PIN debit transactions on Visa Platform Connect. PIN debit transactions are supported only in the US.

Debit cards are branded with debit network logos, such as STAR, NYCE, Accel, and Pulse, and often with Visa or Mastercard logos. The logos indicate that the cards are accepted wherever Visa or Mastercard are accepted and are processed through a debit or credit card network.

The customer chooses whether to process the card as a debit card or a credit card. In either case, the money is taken out of the customer's bank account, and the transaction is included on the customer's bank account statement. The customer does not receive a credit card bill as they would with a regular credit card.

PIN Debit Transactions

PIN debit transactions begin when the customer presents a PIN debit card at the payment terminal.

1. The customer swipes the card through a magnetic card reader, inserts the card into the EMV terminal (contact), or taps the card against an EMV scanner (contactless) on the terminal.

2. The customer chooses to process the card as a debit card or a credit card.

3. If the customer chooses the debit card option, request the PIN debit purchase service. The transaction is routed through the debit card networks. PIN debit transactions are full-financial transactions: they are single-message transactions that include an authorization and capture. As such, you do not need to request a separate capture as you would with a credit card transaction. If the PIN debit purchase service fails, you can attempt to process the card as a credit card.

4. If the customer chooses the credit card option, or if the card cannot be used for a PIN debit purchase, process the transaction as a credit card sale, requesting the authorization and capture services together. The transaction is routed through the credit card networks. See the Payments Developer Guide for the REST API | for information about using credit card services to process debit card transactions.

5. If you need to refund a PIN debit purchase, use the PIN debit credit service.

6. To reverse a PIN debit purchase or PIN debit credit, use the PIN debit reversal service.

PIN Debit Processing Versus Credit Card Processing

You can process Visa or Mastercard branded debit cards through the credit card network by using the credit card authorization and capture services, the same way that you process credit card transactions.

PIN debit transactions and credit card transactions are processed differently from each other:

• For a PIN debit transaction, request only the authorization service. You are not required to request a capture because the authorization service authorizes the transaction and moves the money.
• For a credit card transaction, you receive an authorization code indicating an approval. For a PIN debit transaction, you do not necessarily receive an authorization code. Some processors provide an authorization code, but the code is not required for you to receive your money. For a PIN debit transaction, you cannot verbally obtain an authorization code from the processor or bank.

PIN Debit Network Routing

Listing your preferred network routing codes in your Business Center merchant account is an optional setting. To ensure that transactions are routed to networks in your priority order, recommends including the processingInformation.networkRoutingOrder field in PIN debit requests. Set the value to the priority order of the routing networks for the transaction. When you include this field it overrides your merchant account setting. When you do not include this field in your request, uses the list of network codes in your merchant account.

For Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) transactions, set the processingInformation.networkRoutingOrder field to K. If you do not include this field in EBT requests, your merchant account must be configured with K in the first priority order for network routing.

Terminal IDs

By default, your merchant account is configured to validate a default terminal ID (TID). If you want to override the default TID and send TIDs in the pointOfSaleInformation.terminalId request field in PIN debit requests, contact customer support to configure your account to disable TID validation.

PIN Debit Reconciliation

PIN debit purchase and credit data is added to the TC33A capture file for reconciliation purposes only. Use it to verify this information: merchant ID (MID), total amount, whether the transaction was approved, and the action code.

Track Data

PIN debit processing uses track 2 data in purchase and credit requests. When you include track data in a request using the pointOfSaleInformation.trackData field, the sentinels are required.

In this example, the track 2 data follows the semicolon (;). The most important parts of the track data are the card number, card expiration year, and card expiration month. In this example, the expiration year is 26 and the expiration month is 12. The end sentinel (?) follows the final character of data recorded on the track.

;4xxxxxxxxxxx1111=26121019761186800000?

Electronic Benefit Transfer

Public assistance programs in the United States use Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) payment cards to issue monthly food and cash benefits to eligible people. EBT cards function like prepaid debit cards that can be used at authorized retailers. Food benefits are issued through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps people with low incomes purchase eligible food items.

This payment service enables you to submit purchase, credit, and reversal requests on EBT cards and vouchers. For EBT transactions, only swiped and manually keyed entry are supported. Contactless EMV transactions are not supported.

When a technical problem prevents you from initiating an EBT transaction, follow these steps:

1. Complete an EBT voucher transaction, which is similar to a verbal authorization.
2. Telephone the issuer to receive the approval information verbally.
3. Capture all of the approval information on one of the paper vouchers that you received with the EBT network device.
4. When the EBT system is back online, enter the voucher information into the EBT device to complete the transaction.

PIN Debit Optional Features

This section describes the optional features that are available for PIN debit processing.

Cash Back

The cash back feature enables a customer to add a cash-back amount to the total transaction amount when using a debit card. The customer receives that amount in cash along with the purchase. For example, a customer purchasing products totaling 18.99 might ask for 20.00 cash back. They would pay a total of 38.99 (18.99 + 20.00) with their debit card and receive 20.00 in cash along with their products.

When the customer requests cash back, include the orderInformation.amountDetails.cashbackAmount field in a PIN debit purchase request. Do not include the field when the cash-back amount is 0.00.

For more information, see Contactless EMV Purchase with Cash Back.

Merchant Descriptors

This feature enables you to submit merchant descriptor values that appear on the cardholder's statement as part of the transaction information.

always provides merchant descriptor information to the acquirer for all of your PIN debit purchase and PIN debit credit transactions. When you do not include a particular merchant descriptor in your PIN debit purchase or PIN debit credit request, uses the corresponding value from your merchant account.

For more information, see Swipe Purchase with Merchant Descriptors.

You can include these merchant descriptor fields in a PIN debit purchase or PIN debit credit:

Merchant-Initiated Reversals

When you do not receive a response message after sending a PIN debit purchase or credit request, your request might have timed out. Use the merchant-initiated reversal feature to reverse a timed-out transaction within 2 hours of the original request.

Include the clientReferenceInformation.transactionId field in your original request for a PIN debit purchase.

For more information, see MIT Reversal.

Partial Authorizations

The issuing bank can approve a partial amount for a PIN debit card when the balance on the card is less than the requested authorization amount.

Support for a processor and card type does not guarantee that a partial authorization will be approved. The issuing bank decides whether to approve a partial amount. When the available balance on a debit or prepaid card is lower than the requested authorization amount, the issuing bank might approve a partial amount instead of declining the transaction outright. When this happens, you can complete the transaction by accepting multiple forms of payment. One option is to start with some or all of the approved partial amount, then apply one or more additional payment methods to cover the remaining balance.

Use one of these options to enable partial authorizations:

• To enable the feature for your account, call customer support to have your merchant account enabled for partial authorizations. All of your authorization requests will be enabled for partial authorizations.
• To enable the feature on a single transaction, set the processingInformation.authorizationOptions.partialAuthIndicator field to true in a PIN debit purchase request. Only the specific transaction will be enabled for partial authorization.

You can disable a partial authorization for a specific transaction when your account is enabled for this feature. Set the processingInformation.authorizationOptions.partialAuthIndicator field to false in the PIN debit purchase request.

For more information, see Partial Authorization with Swiped Track Data.

Payment Network Tokens

Payment network tokens are supported as card-present contactless transactions.

Surcharge Fees

The surcharge fees payment service enables you to charge customers a surcharge fee for a PIN debit purchase or credit transaction.

Include the surcharge amount in the total transaction amount and set the orderInformation.amountDetails.surcharge.amount field to the surcharge amount. This information is passed to the issuer and acquirer for tracking. The issuer can provide information about the surcharge amount to the customer.

When there is no surcharge fee, do not include the orderInformation.amountDetails.surcharge.amount field in the request.

For more information, see Contactless EMV Purchase with a Surcharge Fee.