Card payments - anyone work for streamline etc?

[Pappa Lurve]

Hi,

Got a couple of questions about merchant codes. As I understand at least a certain percentage of machines are not located at the registered address. For example, a machine at a Tesco store may be registered to HQ and not to the address of that particular branch etc.

Does anyone know much about this area? Not looking for anything ver complex, just some quick idea of how these things work.

Cheers

PL

[Truckosaurus]

There will usually be a single merchant id for the retailer (eg. Tesco in your example) and then depending on the acquirer (eg. Streamline) you'll either have a group of Terminal ids for a specific store (but not necessarily one TID per POS) or a pool of terminal ids across the whole estate.

[944pi]

In my experience the Merchant ID [MID] is allocated to an outlet and the TID to each POS terminal.

The TID is made up of two parts : the Registered Identifier [RID] and the Unit Identifier. Looking at two receipts from Tesco they don't show the TID, only the merchant number - which are different as they are from different stores.

Tesco will have a RID (or maybe more) and this allows them upto 10,000 unique TIDs to be allocated to the TID.

I believe APACS issue the RID and then merchants will use this to identify their terminals to the acquirers'.

Phil

ETA : APACS does issue the RID = see http://www.apacs.org.uk/payments_industry/rid/indu...

Edited by 944pi on Tuesday 19th August 20:06

[Pappa Lurve]

I think I understand and thanks for the responses. Sorry it has taken me a few days to say thanks, been a hectic week. What I really need to know is, assuming I had access to merchant ID type info, could I ascertain the location that a card user is in whenever they make a payment with their card? Obviously excluding CNP transactions. Not trying to do anything dodgy!

[Truckosaurus]

Pappa Lurve said:

assuming I had access to merchant ID type info, could I ascertain the location that a card user is in whenever they make a payment with their card?

Yes, in theory. But I don't think you'd get a usable enough list of MIDs. Unless you already worked for the store where the card was used or the acquiring bank, and then all the card usage information would be already easily available to you.

[Pappa Lurve]

Could we get the data via a payment processor such as Nomad or Tsys, in real time?

[Truckosaurus]

Pappa Lurve said:

Could we get the data via a payment processor such as Nomad or Tsys, in real time?

I think we've got to the stage where a proper answer would need much more information on who 'we' are and specifically which card holders and merchants you are trying to track.

[Pappa Lurve]

"we" will be my clients! I am involved in m-banking and my company runs m-banking systems for a number of global banks and other organisations including RBSG and Capital One. I am working on a little idea but as I only joined a ew weeks ago there are some gaps in my knowledge. If this is an area you work in, please feel free to PM and we can discuss further.