8-Digit BINs are coming: Ensure you’re ready with PaySim

Mastercard and Visa are moving from 6-digit BINs to 8-digit BINs for prepaid, debit and credit cards in the coming months. Both Visa and Mastercard have confirmed that from April 2022, they will no longer be issuing 6-digit BINs. 

With the timing running out, have you tested your cards and payments system are compatible? 

What happens if it goes wrong? 

• Incorrect routing and authorisation failures 
• Unexpected BIN fees / monthly management fees 
• Settlement and clearing failures 
• Host card management system, affiliate bank processing, reporting failures 
• Incorrectly split portfolios across consumer and commercial 

The impact of 8-digit BINs  

The change to BIN will impact acquirers, issuers and processors.  Affected systems may include  

• ATMs 
• POS devices and terminal 
• Switches 
• Authorisation and settlement systems 

• Data analytics and reporting systems 

Payment companies and services providers should be testing their systems to ensure they can acquire, issue and process transactions from cards with 8-digit BINs. 

PaySim make testing your payment systems simple 

Our payment testing and simulation solution, PaySim helps banks and fintechs ensure their systems are compliant and robust.  We have a long history helping companies get ready for changes like the transition to 8-digit BINs. 

For our own payments platform, Vertexon, we leverage PaySim internally to ensure we can support any mandated changes from the schemes.   

Using PaySim to test 8 digit BINs and more 

Payment testing is usually a time consuming and manual process. PaySim makes it simple for you to simulate the full transaction lifecycle and automate your testing processes.   

PaySim product is easy to install and a cost-effective tool for accelerating your testing regime.  

8 Digit BIN support could be a major internal change for any institution.  

PaySim allows you to: 

• generate transactions from different sources with different card prefixes. 

• Transaction generation 
• Transactions with different card prefixes from ATM, POS or Interchange 
• Route Testing 
• Any updated routing rules are correctly followed 
• End to End verification of card prefixes. 

• Messages for different card prefixes get processed by the correct processes.  

Use PaySim to generate the transactions and authorise replies if required. Then do internal checks that all transactions have been processed as expected with the new 8 Digit BIN rules 

If you want to find out more about PaySim or if you’re an existing customer looking for more information about 8-digit BINs, contact us we’re here to help.