Billing descriptors play an important role in prevention alert functionality. A billing descriptor describes a payment and helps a cardholder identify the transaction on his or her bank statement.

Billing descriptors are what Ethoca and Verifi use to issue prevention alerts. Your processor will have a “main descriptor” on file. However, a single billing descriptor typically has several different variations. Your descriptor may change based on many different things such as the type of transaction you process (card-present, card-not-present), the card brand that issued the card (Mastercard, Visa), the type of card used to process the transaction (debit, credit), etc.

It is important to enroll all possible variations. We suggest you process a couple of test transactions with different cards issued by different brands to see how your descriptors display.

If a descriptor variation isn’t enrolled, you may not receive the most complete protection.

Please reference the following article on best practices for identifying your descriptors to have the most effective alert coverage: Billing Descriptors: Tips, Best Practices & Adding to Your Account

If you continue to have chargebacks associated with different bank identification numbers (BINs) that are not being intercepted by Ethoca and/or Verifi, our support team may be able to assist you with identifying the problem. We do this by performing a chargeback analysis.

In order to perform the analysis we require the following information:

We need all of these pieces of information to review your data. If you are unable to locate the first six digits of the payment card in your processor’s merchant portal, check your gateway. If you have more than one chargeback you would like us to review, we ask that you provide this data in CSV or Excel format.

If you still have questions about prevention alert coverage, contact our client success team. We’ll review your results and help you optimize performance.

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