Mastercard is expanding its data quality network controls for disbursement transactions and will gradually begin enforcing existing rules for populating sender data by declining authorization requests that do not meet its standards with reason code 30 (format error).

Corresponding Block Sender Data Requirements

All clients sending disbursements must ensure that the Sender City is populated with a valid location city name of the sender in the corresponding block.

TabaPay Field	Formatting Requirements & Best Practices	Causes of Format Error Declines (Reason Code 30)
Sender: City	Must contain the valid location city name of the sender. Ensure that this field strictly uses alphabetical characters.	City is left blank, contains all spaces, all zeros, or a combination of unsupported or special characters.
Sender: State	If the sender is located in the U.S. or Canada, this must be populated with a valid 2-character state or province code.	If the Sender Country is the U.S. or Canada, and the state field is populated with an invalid code or if it contains spaces.
Sender: Country	Must contain a valid 3-digit numeric ISO code	Country code is invalid.

Soft Descriptor Merchant Data Requirements

If you utilize TabaPay’s dynamic soft descriptor features to populate the merchant name and city for your transactions, you must ensure that you are passing strictly valid values.

TabaPay Field	Formatting Requirements & Best Practices	Causes of Format Error Declines (Reason Code 30)
Soft Descriptor: Name	Must contain a valid merchant or entity name that is clearly recognizable to the cardholder.	Name is left blank, contains all spaces or all zeros, is entirely numeric, or uses a combination of unsupported or special characters.
Soft Descriptor: City	Must contain the actual name of the city, town, or village as defined by country postal standards. For U.S. region transactions, the spelling must exactly match the U.S. Postal Service list of acceptable cities.	City left blank, contains all spaces or all zeros, or uses unsupported characters. City populated with non-city data (e.g., phone numbers, street addresses, domain names, country codes, or the word "Internet").
Soft Descriptor: Country	Must contain a valid 3-digit numeric ISO code	Country left blank, populated with an invalid code Country code logically conflicts with the city provided.

What This Means for You

When formatting your API payloads do not use placeholder values (like "N/A" or "00000"), do not put URLs or phone numbers in city fields, and ensure that state and country codes exactly match standard ISO definitions. If any of these fields fail Mastercard's network edits, your authorization request may be rejected with a Message Format Error (reason code 30).

Please work with your technical teams to audit your transaction data payloads to avoid interruptions to your disbursement traffic.

If you have any questions about this bulletin please reach out to [email protected].