As your payments partner, we are committed to keeping you up-to-date with industry changes and card brands developments.
Originally introduced as an electronic replacement for the paper card recovery bulletin, account verification messages have evolved to support authentication data and have become important to new value-added digital services such as Visa Direct and Visa Token Service.
Visa has required support account verification messages globally since 2008 and, since then, required that they hold a value of zero so as not to impact the available balance on the card in any way.
Visa observe that some merchants are still submitting authorisations with low values instead of zero-amount account verifications.
Action required:
With the exception of those operating pay-at-the-pump fuel transactions at AFDs (Automated Fuel Dispensers), all Customers wanting to perform verification of a card account, prior to any amount being debited must use the correct identifiers and a zero-amount in those verification requests.
Contact your Elavon representative or your terminal provider for more information.