Visa Direct Name Field Requirements

June 16th, 2025

Hello,

As part of upcoming Visa Direct compliance changes, please review the following data requirements that apply to your use of TabaPay for Visa Person-to-Person (P2P), Account-to-Account (A2A), and Business-to-Consumer transactions. Proper population of name fields is critical to avoid processing errors, downstream declines, and potential compliance violations.

Impacted Fields

Data Integrity Rules for Name Fields

Please ensure adherence to the following rules for individual sender and recipient name fields on Visa Direct transactions

Whenever the sender or recipient name of an individual is populated, both first.name and last.name fields must be populated.
Name fields cannot be populated with the following characters:
Name fields must not be populated with all numeric characters.
Wherever present, name fields must be populated with valid, legal names.
Do not populate name fields with fictitious names, including email addresss, aliases, usernames, and nicknames.
Do not populate name fields with non-English language characters (including characters from non-Latin alphabets or characters with umlauts, accents, and other diacritical marks)
Do not populate name fields with non-informative or placeholder data (e.g. 123456, TEST, ---)

Examples of Invalid Data That Will Result in Noncompliance

Special Considerations

These updates are global; merchants sending transactions to any market must comply.
For more information on general character restrictions in TabaPay's API, refer to Data - Restricted Characters.
UPDATE: As of 9/8/25 the mandate has been updated by Visa to defer the introduction of automatic network declines under reason code 64 (Transaction does not meet AML requirements). Merchants are still expected to comply with all existing Visa Direct rules to populate name fields with valid, legal names.

Why This Matters

Networks are increasing enforcement of name integrity checks to ensure compliance with regulatory standards for AML, sanctions screening, and transparency. Invalid or missing data may result in issuer declines or network rejections.

Below are some helpful links from our developers site:

If you have any questions about these changes or need assistance reviewing your current integration, please reach out to [email protected].

Thank you,

The TabaPay Team