Merchant Accounts and International Credit C ards

Rick Root

Okay, so I have a little rant here.


99% of the credit cards we accept at UNC-Chapel Hill are American issued cards, and we have AVS enabled on our merchant account.


However, when someone tries to use an internationally issued card, it is rejected because AVS only works on US-issued cards.


So, I've gone out of my way in the ADF to pass a different merchant account if they've chosen a foreign country as their billing address, and this merchant account is configured to not use AVS.


Why do I have to do this?  Couldn't or shouldn't Blackbaud make it so that international cards ignore AVS since AVS is not supported?


 

Tara Dustrude

Hello Rick!


This may depend on what merchant you use. However, I can speak to how this works for Blackbaud Merchant Services. We have AVS settings of Full, Medium, Light, and None. What I generally recommend for organizations that process international transactions, such as yours, is to set the AVS to Light...and here's why...


AVS is asking two questions: Does the numeric portion of the street address match? Does the zip code match? As you've seen, many international banks do not participate in this verification. When you have AVS set to Medium we are looking for a "Yes" to at least one of those two questions to pass the check. However, with Light we are looking for either a "Yes" or an "Unavailable" response. This means for those banks that participate we are still expecting the address to pass AVS but for those banks that don't participate the transaction can still be processed.


It's similar to what you are describing, essentially we're ignoring the address for any bank that isn't going to participate (i.e international transactions).


I hope this helps! We have some documentation on this here: https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/53278. If you have any follow-up questions on how BBMS uses AVS please let me know.


Tara