Payment Account Validation

The Payment Account Validation API allows you to determine if a particular cardholder’s account is valid and in good standing. The API currently provides four methods of account validation: Account Verification (also known as a $0 authorization), Address Verification (AVS), Card Verification Value (CVV2) Validation, and Account Name Inquiry (ANI).  The ability to pre-validate an account increases the probability of a successful, seamless transaction flow.  There are many situations in which you may need to know if a Visa account provided by your customer is valid before making services available. Examples include validating a sender and/or recipient account before initiating a money transfer between them, or validating an account before loading it into a digital wallet or card-on-file repository.

All Visa issuers support Account Verification requests. U.S. and U.K. issuers are required to support Address Verification Service and CVV2 Validation requests; participation in both services is optional for all other issuers. If you request an Address Verification or CVV2 Validation from a non-participating issuer, you will receive an appropriate Action Code in the response.

The Payment Account Validation API is available for use by any developer in sandbox and production. However, Visa retains the right to review your project implementation of this API before production on-boarding to ensure that it is being used appropriately.