Account Updater Models

What is an ideal payment gateway? This is a payment gateway solution that is modern, reliable, and flexible. If you want your payment processing solution to meet this standard, you need to consider the idea of implementing the account updater mechanism. This mechanism helps to update cardholder information on a regular basis (card expiration date, sometimes even card numbers). But you need to know that different credit card associations use different account updater models. There are three of them file-based models, subscription-based model, and integrated models.

Visa and MasterCard use a file-based model. A merchant sends a file with card numbers and, after some certain period, receives the file with the information on the respective updates. The other model is utilized by American Express. It is a subscription-based one. Under this model, a file with accounts a merchant wants to receive updates for is sent. The merchants subscribe for the updates and get the opportunity to download the archive with respective updates regularly (weekly, monthly, etc.). Many payment gateways prefer the so-called integrated model. The information on updates is obtained from the issuer during processing, and then this data is sent to a merchant with every specific transaction.

If you have your own subscription payment gateway, you might be interested in the additional information on this issue. You may consider the original article, which is shared at #UniPayGateway. Also, a lot of useful and interesting facts concerning payment processing can be found at Paylosophy Blog.