Address Verification Service (AVS)

Introduction

The Address Verification Service (AVS) offers an additional layer of fraud protection by verifying the billing address of a cardholder for card transactions.

By submitting your customer’s billing address in your transaction request, you enable the issuer to compare this address with the one stored in its database. The result can help you determine the fair use of a card and therefore

• Minimise fraud.
• Reduce chargebacks.

Implement AVS

Follow these steps to implement the AVS when processing transactions:

1. Your customers finalise an order in your shop.
2. You send a CreateHostedCheckout/CreatePayment request as an authorisation (via property cardpaymentmethodspecificinput.authorizationmode) to our platform, including your customer's billing address in property order.customer.billingAddress.
3. We submit the card data and billing address to the acquirer. We receive the transaction result, including the AVS check result.
4. We return the CVV check result in our immediate response (for CreatePayment requests) / in a GetHostedCheckout request (for CreateHostedCheckout requests) in property payment.paymentOutput.cardPaymentMethodSpecificOutput.fraudResults.avsResult
5. Using our status code overview, you perform a manual review of the AVS check result, possibly in conjunction with a general Fraud Prevention analysis.
6. Depending on your assessment, you capture/cancel the authorisation.

Understand AVS result codes and guidelines

AVS result codes are single-character alphabetic codes that signify the issuer's response.

These codes indicate various levels of address match or mismatch:

avsResultvalue	Domestic	Cross-border
A	Yes	Yes
B	Yes	Yes
C	Yes	Yes
D		Yes
F	Yes
G		Yes
I		Yes
M		Yes
N	Yes	Yes
P	Yes	Yes
R	Yes
S	Yes	Yes
U	Yes
W	Yes
X
Y	Yes
Z	Yes	Yes
0	Yes	Yes

Guidelines for Using Domestic and Cross-border AVS Result Codes

While we cannot recommend any particular approach, the following general guidelines are drawn from card-not-present industry practices and may be helpful.

avsResultvalue		Definition	Explanation	Action(s) to consider
Domestic	Cross-border
Y	D	Exact Match	Both street address and ZIP or Postal Code match.	Accept Transaction
F	M	Exact Match	Both street address and ZIP or Postal Code match.	Proceed with transactions for which you have received an authorisation approval and an "exact match."
A	B	Partial Match	Street address matches, but ZIP or Postal Code does not.	Follow up before shipping orders: the issuer might have the wrong ZIP or Postal Code in its file; merchant staff may have entered the ZIP or Postal Code incorrectly this response may indicate a potentially fraudulent situation.
Z	P	Partial Match	ZIP Code matches, but street address does not.	Unless you sent only a ZIP or Postal Code AVS request and it matched, you may want to follow up before shipping orders. The issuer might: this response may indicate a potentially fraudulent situation. have the wrong address in its file or have the same address information in a different format the cardholder may have recently moved merchant staff may have entered the address incorrectly
N	N	No Match	Street address and ZIP or Postal Code do not match.	Follow up with the cardholder before shipping orders. The cardholder might: have moved recently and not yet notified the issuer have given you the shipping address instead of the billing address the person may be attempting to execute a fraudulent transaction. "No match" responses clearly warrant further investigation.