Using the Stored Credential Field to Segment Your Payments Data

At Pagos, we’re always looking for ways to help you better segment and understand your payments data. If your company vaults cardholder credentials, for example, the Stored Credential data field can be an extremely helpful value in filtering and exploring your transaction data. Using Peacock by Pagos, you can explore visualizations of your comprehensive payments data, filtered by the seven stored credential values (defined in the bullets below). Now, you can also group and subgroup Canary triggers by the same field. But what exactly are the types of transactions that processors label with “stored credential”? And what are use cases for the stored credential data segments? 

Stored Credential Definitions

At its most basic level, a stored credential refers to the Primary Account Number (PAN) or payment token a customer elects to save in a merchant’s vault for ease of use in future or recurring transactions. 

Stored Credential is a field that Pagos receives from your connected payment processors for each transaction you process. It can return seven different values, each indicating the type of transaction. Six types of the stored credential transaction types fall into two categories: Merchant-Initiated Transactions (MIT) and Cardholder-initiated Transactions (CIT). The seventh value in the Stored Credential data field is unknown, which Pagos automatically assigns to any transactions the processor didn’t provide Stored Credential fields for.

An MIT is a transaction that occurs without the cardholder’s active participation. For a merchant to initiate this sort of transaction, the cardholder must agree to the merchant vaulting their card details and using their payment method on their behalf. There are a few types of MITs:

• Recurring – A transaction in a series of transactions made on a fixed, regular interval, as agreed upon by the merchant and cardholder. A subscription service consists of recurring payments.
• Installment – A single purchase of goods or services that is billed in payment installments, as agreed upon by the merchant and cardholder. For example, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) purchases are paid in installments.
• Card-on-file-repeat – This is a dynamic, standing instruction—agreed upon between the merchant and cardholder—to increase the balance of a cardholder’s account when it drops below a certain level. For example, if a merchant allows a customer to use their account balance to make purchases, they may have an agreement with that customer to charge their card-on-file periodically to increase said account balance whenever it dips below a certain dollar amount. 

A CIT is a transaction in which the cardholder actively participates. For example, when a cardholder allows a merchant to store their payment credentials and then uses them to make purchases at undetermined intervals. There are a few types of CITs:

• One-time – A transaction where the merchant doesn’t store the customer’s payment information on file.
• Recurring-first – The first transaction in a recurring series. Merchants use this to help them identify their new customers.
• Card-on-file-vault – A transaction initiated by a customer, using stored card credentials they previously saved in your vault. 

Using Stored Credential in Peacock

In Peacock, you can use a stored credential value to segment any chart in your Home dashboard, Standard dashboards, or Custom Dashboards. To do so, click the + More button at the top of a dashboard, then click Stored Credential in the drop-down menu. Once you click Stored Credential, the list of values appears in the primary filter bar. Learn more about Peacock data filters in our Product Documentation

When you select one or more of the stored credential value options, Peacock will filter for the value(s) on all charts in that dashboard. The options available for filtering are the seven transaction types defined in the section above. There are many reasons why you may be interested in segmenting or comparing your data using the Stored Credential field. For example, you may want to monitor transaction count of only recurring transactions after running a promotion on your subscription business.

Using Stored Credential in Canary

In Canary, you can now configure triggers to group or subgroup transactions by Stored Credential. This means Canary can alert you on events specific to any stored credential value. By default, Canary will monitor all stored credential values simultaneously; if you’d prefer to just monitor a few of these values, then enter any of the transaction types (defined above) in a comma delimited list in the Filter field.

For example, you could create a trigger with the following parameters:

• Metric: Authorization Rate
• Group: Stored Credential
• Filter: recurring

Canary would then alert you if your authorization rate on recurring transactions crossed the predefined threshold. Depending on the value you type into the Filter field for a new trigger, you can monitor subscription transactions separately from one-time transactions and better diagnose any challenges that could create unfavorable authorization rates.

Learn More About Peacock and Canary

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