AVS

AVS stands for "address verification service". It’s sometimes also referred to as "address verification system".

The Address Verification Service (AVS) is a functionality provided by card networks and issuers to merchants to detect suspicious credit card transactions and prevent credit card fraud. It allows merchants and acquirers, especially those operating in an e-commerce environment, to compare various subfields such as postal code, name, address, email, and phone number provided by the customer at the point of sale with cardholder information on file with the issuer. Using AVS can significantly improve authorization approval rates, especially in the US, UK, and Canada.

How does address verification service work?

Payment processing providers and issuers (also called issuing banks) offer AVS to businesses as a tool to cut down on credit card fraud. AVS occurs during the card authorisation portion of a customer transaction. When a customer submits a card for payment during checkout, they provide a billing address. Upon accepting payment information, the business’s payment processor contacts the bank that issued the card with a request to authorize the purchase. During authorization, the issuer checks:

• The billing address provided during checkout matches the address on file for the card. (This is the "address verification" component of the AVS authentication process.)

AVS is typically used to authenticate a cardholder's identity for card-not-present (CNP) transactions, like online purchases.

How to start using address verification service?

Address verification (AVS) checks two pieces of information, the postal code and the billing street address. AVS checks determine whether this information matches the billing address on file with the card issuer.

Support for both types of AVS checks varies by country and card issuer (for example, certain countries don’t use a postal code or some card issuers don’t support street address verification). However, street address verification is commonly supported for cards issued in the United States and Canada.

A merchant needs to send additional parameters in Authorization or Pre-Authorization requests. The below parameters are mandatory in order for AVS to be attempted:

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Merchants may include billing address parameters in the Hosted Payment Page (HPP) request to support AVS validation. When these parameters are not supplied, the HPP will prompt the customer to provide the required address fields.

Test Cases

In order to test different scenarios AVS response codes can be triggered by using these test cases in the sandbox environment.