VAU BACKGROUND: Visa Account Updater (VAU) enables a secure electronic exchange of account information updates between participating Visa card issuers and acquirers for credential-on-file (COF) merchants, which enables a more seamless payment process. When participating issuers re-issue cards, they submit the new account number and expiration date to VAU. Participating merchants send inquiries on their customer’s stored credentials to VAU and are provided with updated card information, if available. This helps acquirers to proactively update buyer credentials prior to any purchase transaction. In addition to purchase transactions, VAU also supports Visa Direct (OCT and AFT) and merchandize returns transactions.
VAU Merchant Enrollment API: Allows an acquirer/processor to enroll up to 100 merchants in one API call eliminating the need to call repeatedly. This would speed up the enrollment process. The API returns ‘Success’, ‘Reject’, ‘In-Progress’ status that requires additional research. The rejects may arise if the input request fields are not populated correctly or if some required fields are not entered. The ‘In-Progress’ status is returned when additional research is required by our compliance department
All Visa Account Updater programs in production require the originator to be a licensed Visa acquirer or be sponsored by a licensed Visa acquirer who is ready and able to sponsor Visa Account Updater programs. Please reach out to your Visa account representative to get more information about Visa licensing requirements.
The VAU Merchant Enrollment API can be used in the sandbox by any developer. Test Acquiring Segment and other data are provided as part of the sandbox test data. The developer can use this data to test for various scenarios in the sandbox.
However, in order to use the VAU Merchant Enrollment API in production, the originator must either be a licensed Visa acquirer, or a third party Originator that is being sponsored by a licensed Visa acquirer for a VAU program. In addition, acquirers must be enrolled as a participating acquirer in VAU and provisioned with a VAU Segment ID and the API request will be validated to ensure that the submitted card numbers are associated with acquiring BINs.
Visa Account Updater Merchant Enrollment API can be used by developers in the sandbox after registering in Visa Developer Center (VDC), verify login and set up sandbox environment. However, when a client is ready to move to production, then, there are couple of steps needs to be followed depending on whether a client is brand new to VAU and using API only, or existing batch client and wants to use API.
For detailed implementation steps, please refer to 'How to Use VAU Merchant Enrollment API'.
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To view availability of all products, refer to the Availability Matrix.
As part of continuing security improvements, Visa enabled Message Level Encryption (MLE) for VAU Merchant Enrollment API. Clients using VAU Merchant EnrollmentAPI are required to support MLE in both certification and production environment.
Refer to the Message Level Encryption guide at the Visa Developer Center website for instructions on using MLE.
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