Address Verification Service (AVS)
Protect against fraudulent transactions. Available worldwide.
Address Verification Service (AVS) is a fraud prevention mechanism that reduces fraud and chargebacks. The service verifies if the card issuer recognizes the address provided by a cardholder. The results of the verification will help you determine whether to accept or decline a particular transaction or take further action. AVS is effective to both reduce fraud and reduce chargebacks.
Use Cases
- Customer Onboarding and Account Opening: You use AVS to confirm the address details provided by new customers when opening accounts on your platform.
- Saving Cards on Your Platform: You want to ensure all saved cards used on your platform will have low chargeback rates by using AVS when a customer adds a new card.
- E-commerce: You want to verify the billing address for saved cards and guest checkouts to check against the issuer's records to reduce your chargebacks.
Benefits
AVS was designed to reduce fraud in the Card Not Present (CNP) environment, where a possession of physical card alone isn't sufficient to conduct an e-commerce transaction.
While AVS certainly detects obvious mismatches in address information, it is not a guaranteed fraud prevention tool. TabaPay suggests utilizing a variety of fraud detection tools in conjunction with AVS to identify and prevent fraud.
Using ANI with AVS
Clients are encouraged to grab the avsID from the Query Card API response, and use it in the Create Transaction API request. This would not verity users during the transaction, but would help track and monitor efficacy of both AVS and ANI on processing.
How AVS works
- Request your consumer’s to provide cardholder billing data - Street Address and ZIP Code, and send this address to us using the Card Inquiry API
- This information will be forwarded to the card issuer - Issuers validate key elements of the address, and match the values received against the values they have received from their customer (the cardholder)
- We will provide you the results of the Address Verification. Based on the result, you can determine if you want the consumer to proceed further in the transaction or not. Our recommendation is to proceed with the transaction in the case of a full or partial match. And terminate when there is no match.
Numeric Verification Only
Only the numerical portion of the address is verified by the issuer during an AVS check. Typically, only the house number and ZIP/postal code are compared.
When the issuer is unable to match the values exactly, AVS code that indicates 'how' the address verification failed is returned. For example:
AVS code of A indicates that the address matches (again, numeric portion of the address) but the ZIP code doesn’t match.
Updated 2 months ago