Inclusion of PAR in Transaction History

[CDR-API-Stream]

Description

The submission from Visa to the May draft requested the inclusion of a Payment Account Reference field in the Transaction History payload.

Area Affected

Transaction History end points and payloads.

Change Proposed

The submission from Visa requested the following:

Include PAR (Payment Account References) in the detailed responses. While PAR is not a consumer-facing attribute, it is pertinent in instances where underlying parties serve loyalty/rewards programs or to assess risk/fraud in the absence of a card number.

[CDR-API-Stream]

It is the understanding of the DSB that the Payment Account Reference is field that is unique to a PAN and associated with tokens of the PAN under multi-merchant tokenisation and other tokenisation mechanisms. It is not meant to be used as a consumer identifier but can act as a proxy for the PAN.

In this context, while a PAR field can easily be added as an optional field to the transaction structure, the DSB have concerns of the implication for consumers of the inclusion of this field. While the field is not deemed personally identifiable, it may be used to correlate transaction activities across consumers in a way that would not be in keeping with the spirit of the CDR as it has been expressed to date.

Feedback on this issue would be welcome. If the concerns of the DSB can be addressed inclusion of the field will be considered, otherwise it will not be recommended for inclusion at this time.

[CDR-API-Stream]

As there has been no feedback supporting the inclusion of PAR and there are active concerns around the use and meaning of the field in the CDR context the current recommendation of the DSB will be to not include the field.