• Face-to-face sales

• Recognising valid cards
• Card handling procedures

• Card-not-present sales

• Card-not-present security
• E-commerce
• Mobile commerce
• Mail Order and Telephone Order
• Making payments to Visa cards
• Recurring payments

Address Verification Service

The Address Verification Service (AVS) does exactly what it says – it verifies a cardholder’s billing address. It’s an extra security measure that could substantially reduce the number of disputed transactions you have to deal with.

Currently, AVS is only available to merchants in the UK.

Criminals using stolen or counterfeit cards are unlikely to know billing addresses. So, when the cardholder’s address has been verified, you can feel far more confident that the purchase is legitimate.

This makes AVS especially useful in Mail Order and Telephone Order (MOTO) and e-commerce transactions, where you do not see the card or cardholder.

The system works by checking the street address and postcode supplied by the buyer, which are contained in a message sent by the merchant to the card issuing bank during the normal course of transaction authorisation.