Back to All

Questions about Soft Descriptor use

The documentation for the Soft Descriptor says that some characters are explicitly restricted. Since one of the Soft Descriptor fields is an email address, and the @ character is explicitly restricted, are we to understand that the restrictions are only for the name field?

There is a table for Visa Guidelines. That table has a Field column, but from the row values it appears that the Field is always the name field of the Soft Descriptor, and that the only difference between the two rows in the table is that the first row is for push transactions and the second row is for pull transactions. The first row includes "Card Acceptor City Name", and I concluded that "City" is incorrect. The Soft Descriptor documentation does not mention "Card Acceptor" any of its fields, so assuming the "Card Acceptor Name" = name.

The Statement Descriptor documentation topic describes using an asterisk as a delimiter for both push and pull operations, and describes {processor}*{person name} as the content for person-to-person payments.

In the Visa Guidelines the documentation for the push row shows:

P2P: P2P
Brandname_Sender
Name

Does that mean that the name should be P2P {processor} {person name}, rather than {processor}*{person name} as described in the Statement Descriptor documentation? (Some of the other types in that row show an underscore character, which is also not shown in the Statement Descriptor documentation.)

The documentation in the pull row seems to match the Statement Descriptor documentation.

The [MasterCard Guidelines](https://developers.tabapay.com/docs/soft-descriptor#mastercard-guidelines) seem to indicate that a space/blank should be the delimiter, and therefore that the asterisk is not appropriate for the delimiter. Is that accurate?

We appreciate the documentation regarding the descriptor because finding it in the card processor documentation is challenging.


Questions? Contact Sales or make a post