Why Pre-certification Testing Saves Time and Money for Card Issuers

In part three of this series on payment card certification, we come at last to the card issuers.

Together American Express, Discover, and all of the various Mastercard and Visa member organizations have issued more than 2 billion cards in the US, comprising more than 800 million credit cards and 1.2 million debit cards. 

With a population of approximately 260 million citizens over the age of 18, that means that there are almost eight cards issued for every adult in the country. As we discussed in Part one of this series, How To Streamline the Payment Card Certification Process, there are many reasons why consumers have significantly reduced their use of cash and checks in favor of these payment cards.

Consumers love the convenience that cards offer, as well as the huge variety of perks and rewards that are available from various card issuers (more on that later). According to management consultancy firm Alphabridge, increasingly impatient consumers are now more likely to make purchasing decisions based on how easy and quick the process is, rather than solely on the price of the product, with approximately 77% of consumers considering convenience to be important when purchasing a product or service.

Of course, consumers would not have all the convenience of electronic transactions without their credit and debit cards, which is where the issuers come in. By granting access to either the consumer’s own money (via a debit card) or providing a short-term loan (via a credit card), issuers gain the opportunity to generate both fee and interest income.

A lot of income. As reported by WalletHub, US consumers paid more than 232 billion dollars in interest and fees to card issuers in 2023.

Competition Drives Innovation and Change Across the Payment Industry

With this much money at stake, the competition among card issuers is incredibly fierce. Not surprisingly, issuers, and their supporting card brands, spend billions of dollars every year marketing their respective products to consumers, with the end goal of elevating their cards to the prime “top-of-wallet” position – indicating it’s the card of choice for most purchases.

It must be noted that while access to credit and debit accounts is still key, continued advances in payment technology will increasingly reduce the need for physical cards.

Given the fact that most consumers already have multiple cards at their disposal, as well as easy access to additional cards whenever they want, card issuers – backed by the card brands - must continue to develop innovative products and programs that resonate with today’s convenience-oriented consumers.

As we noted in the previous blogs in this series, it is competition – in this case for wallet space between card issuers - that drives so much innovation and change across the payment industry. Which means that card issuers are subject to the same specification changes and mandates as acquirers – only in reverse.

Pre-Certification is the Key to Success

Issuers need the ability to create and test messages and transactions as if they are being sent in by acquirers, processors, or networks in order to test how their various issuing systems respond. Because Paragon regularly supplies clients with updated specifications for its Web FASTest payment testing solution to support mandated industry changes - including support for both the issuer and acquirer processing components - card issuers can immediately see all the details for how they are supposed to respond to any specific message or transaction, as well as what acquirers will be sending to them.

Using the Web FASTest data to make the required changes to its internal systems – which can include authorization systems, fraud prevention engines, and dispute management applications – a card issuer can then configure Web FASTest to send the appropriate acquirer messages and transactions to those internal systems, ensuring that they are correctly responding according to the updated specification being tested.

The combination of updated and accurate specification data, along with 24/7 anytime, anywhere remote access capabilities, provides card issuers with the tools and time they need to ensure all internal testing is completed successfully before initiating the formal network certification process.

Web FASTest also enables any card issuer to create, manage, and automate certification-related projects that contain the prescribed tests and associated data needed to execute all the tests and track the project progress to completion.

Just as for merchants and acquirers, the payment card certification process is critically important to card issuers and continues to play a valuable and necessary role in protecting the overall safety and security of the retail payment industry.

Based on Paragon’s 30 years of experience and our laser focus on payment card testing, we can help card issuers reduce the amount of time and effort required to analyze the impact of mandated changes on their business and simulate inbound messages and transactions as if they actually came from a network, merchant acquirer of or processing partner.

Tools like Web FASTest provide any payment industry participant with an opportunity to improve the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of their testing capabilities to reduce the time and cost involved with payment card certification.

Interested in finding out more about how Paragon Web FASTest can help streamline the payment card certification process for your issuing institution? To learn more, please reach out today and request a consultation with one of our payment industry specialists.