What is Enhanced BIN Data and Why Does It Matter?

We all have examples that come to mind of situations when incorrect or incomplete data has led us afowl. Maybe it led to a bad customer experience and damage to reputation or resulted in additional (and unnecessary) cost to run the business. We’ve taken what we heard and learned from merchants’ stories and built Parrot by Pagos to give you answers to questions like:

• How do we optimize the experience, support, and processing of our payments?

• Should I try a declined transaction again?

• What is driving performance and the cost of card payments?

When it comes to card payments, your journey to greater understanding and better decisions starts with the bank identification number (BIN). And Parrot is all about better BIN data. The better your BIN data is, the more insight you’ll have in getting to know your cardholders and the more prepared you can be when it comes to managing your payments performance. 
When it comes to this data, more is better. Parrot helps by optionally providing enhanced BIN data, giving you more context than previously possible, and helping you to make more accurate decisions for your business and customers. For more details on using foundational BIN data in your payment strategy check out our blog on BIN use cases.

Standard BIN Data vs. Enhanced BIN Data

A standard BIN response generally returns the: 

• BIN number

• Card Network

• Card Type

• Card Product

• Bank Name

• Issuing Country

There’s nothing wrong with the standard data, in fact it’s essential to making sense of your payments ecosystem. You could build out a useful BIN analysis with the network name, card type, product name, and issuing country. But if you could go further, wouldn’t you want to?? 

Just look at how much more data you would receive if you were to query the same BIN in Parrot and include enhanced BIN data:

The more data you have at your disposal, the better prepared you will be to make decisions about your payment strategy. Imagine the positive impact to your payments analysis, strategy, and decision making if you are able to see the estimated interchange rates as well as the authentication requirements associated with a cardholder in addition to all of the standard fields. Those are just two examples of the additional fields that Parrot offers. Let’s get into what these enhanced fields can do!    

What are the Enhanced BIN Data Fields?

Clean Bank Names

Issuing bank names are inconsistent across all of the different parties that touch your payments data. Sometimes an issuing bank name is abbreviated or truncated by the issuer or processor. Sometimes the issuing bank name is provided in all upper-case letters. In rare cases it can even be misspelled. It’s pandemonium: inconsistencies like these can lead to inaccuracies in your analysis that might be critical to managing your payment performance and understanding your customers.

In keeping true to our mission, we’ve created a clean bank name mapping for the issuing bank name. Parrot by Pagos cuts through the noise by standardizing the bank name format to proper case, removing unnecessary punctuation and misspellings, and spelling out uncommon banking acronyms. The result is harmonized, clean bank names for all of your BIN data.

Here is an example of the different ways we have seen an issuing bank name sent to us and the Parrot clean bank name that they now map to:

• Issuing Bank 1 - American F.C.U

• Issuing Bank 2 - AMERICAN FCU

• Issuing Bank 3 - AMERICAN-FED-CU

• Parrot Clean Bank Name - American Federal Credit Union

BIN analysis just became a whole lot easier with Parrot taking care of the data cleaning on your behalf.

Additional Networks

A standard BIN response will return only the first global network entry for a given BIN. With enhanced BIN data, you can identify any underlying additional networks that are associated with one card, allowing you to provide a more personalized checkout experience for your cardholder. For more information check out our blog on the value of additional networks.

Authentication

With enhanced BIN data, you can get insight into whether or not there are additional forms of authentication required on a particular card type. For example, you can find out if certain cards require 3D Secure authentication. With that knowledge in hand you can provide a better checkout experience for a customer or even make a business case for why you should or should not invest in a 3D Secure solution.

Cost Regulation

Wouldn’t it be great to understand the interchange cost implications associated with the cards you process before the end of the month or—even better—before you process them? With enhanced BIN data, you can receive estimated interchange costs for transactions made with the associated payment card as well as an indicator of whether or not the payment card is regulated by the Durbin Amendment, a US law that regulates interchange fees for cards issued by large banks.

More Enhanced Data Fields Coming Soon

We are continuing to add more enhanced data fields all of the time. Here’s a look at some of the other enhanced fields that are coming to Parrot soon:

• Level 2 and Level 3 data: These indicators will alert you to a card's ability to qualify for level 2 and level 3 interchange rates.

• Platform Code: Platform codes are the larger bucket that product codes fall into, such as Business, Consumer, Commercial, and Government. If you’re working with data in aggregate then getting a snapshot of the larger picture can help you better understand where to focus your efforts and attention.

• BIN Length: This is the number of digits in a BIN. With the industry moving towards the adoption of 8 digit BINs, this helps you determine whether you’re dealing with a 6 digit or 8 digit BIN.

• VAU - This is a Visa specific indicator that will tell you whether or not a specific BIN is enrolled in and eligible for Visa Account Updater, helping you to better manage your account updater strategy.

Give Your BINs a Boost

Are you ready to improve the sophistication of your BIN and customer analysis?

Interested in learning more about Parrot or any of our other payments solutions? Connect with the Pagos team today!