Back in the days when I used Sprint as my mobile phone provider, I’d pay for them online with my Visa card. The phone was set-up under my step-father’s full name. I had to enter his name and my debit card number/expy date for it to work.
It’s hard to say how close you are to the truth, Pleonast, and that’s part of the problem.
I spent nearly five years at my last job working with credit cards, transaction processing, fraud, chargebacks, etc. - and not from an accounting perspective, either - I’m a computer programmer.
There are many software companies out there who will offer you software to collect and process credit card transactions. These can range from programs that take a data file that you have to import to an all-in-one solution that connects to a card verification service in real time to give you near-instantaneous authorizations for online purchasing. It depends on how much you’re willing to pay for the service.
At my company, for example, we had one package that took a daily text file, dialed up a credit card verification service via modem, and transmitted a load of transactions for recurring billing.
We also had a completely separate system that did an initial authorization on the spot, and then came back to collect all the funds (known in the industry as a “capture”) later that evening in one big batch.
You have to satisfy your own internal data requirements first, then those of any any middle-ware you may be using, plus those of the verification service you are using, and finally, those of the issuing bank.
All sorts of things may go wrong at any point:[ul][li]We flip-flopped on the design trying to decide if we would store “cardholder name” separately from the names on the customers’ accounts in our system, since we had to send something in case they wanted to get billed automatically.[]We tested with the middleware company for weeks trying to figure out why we got different results from their address verification feature using the same cards on different days.[]Different banks held our authorizations for differing periods of time, occasionally leading to irate calls from customers who had exceeded their credit limits.[/ul]I know in our case, we had no way of knowing what the verification service and issuing banks would try to match against except a very limited list of fields the middleware vendor could verify – and even that seemed to be inaccurately described at best.[/li]
By telling you, the customer, up front that you must enter the cardholder name exactly as it appears on the card, they’re ensuring that should one or more of the services they employ between the front end and their lockbox need to match that exact name, they’ve covered their bases.
my dad has problems with this… he spells his name ‘chris’ but his birth certificate (so therefore passport etc.) says ‘cris’. (my grandmother’s english was very poor).
as a result he occaisionally has to sign for things and it looks like fraud cause no one would spell their own name wrong, right?
i guess that’s the reasoning behind it, like to catch fraudsters out.