Integration Guidelines

Balance Inquiry

Pre-Paid Cards

Pre-paid credit cards are fixed value cards branded with a payment brand logo: Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, or JCB. Although these cards can be referred to as ‘gift cards’, they are proprietary stored value cards purchased by merchants and issued to customers for use only at the merchant location or online store. Payment brand issued prepaid cards are meant to be accepted anywhere the payment brand is accepted and not limited to a particular merchant. Pre-paid credit card transactions flow through the normal credit card authorization process and can be processed in any industry.

Pre-Paid Card Processing

• Verify pre-paid credit card balances by calling the CWS QueryAccount operation.
• Pre-paid cards can be issued under any BIN range managed by a payment brand, not just a prepaid range. The identification of pre-paid cards is at the discretion of the payment brand and/or issuer. Pre-paid cards can be labeled by the issuer as credit or debit cards.
• Pre-paid cards are not covered under brand tolerance rules. All authorizations on prepaid cards must be equal to or less than the available balance at the time of the authorization to avoid chargebacks.
• If the card issuer returns the remaining balance for the card and the purchase amount does not exceed the available balance, the remaining balance after the purchase is returned in BankcardTransactionResponse.FinalBalance. A negative balance is returned as zero.
• Displaying balances on a terminal screen or adding to a printed receipt is optional for all brands except MasterCard. MasterCard requires that balances, when available, are displayed on a screen or printed on the customer receipt.