General Requirements

The billingDescriptor element is used to override the merchant name that is sent to a cardholder's bank where applicable.

The merchant name is the most important factor in cardholder recognition of a transaction record typically printed on a cardholder statement. It should reflect the operating name of a company (i.e. ‘Doing Business As’ (DBA) name), as opposed to the legal name, by which a cardholder would recognize the merchant to avoid any confusion and to minimize copy requests.

As a standard, acquirers usually forward the merchant name they got on file with the merchant’s account. Please note that the card organizations established strict rules around merchant names on cardholder statements.

However, there are a number of specific exceptions where supplementary data can be added to the DBA name depending on the use case and industry (e.g. airlines, railway services, car rental, fuel stations etc.).

Formatting the merchant name

The authorization and clearing systems of the card organizations provide varying sizes for merchant names. The smallest common denominator is 22 characters. Thus, merchant names longer than 22 characters will not fit into the merchant name field and must be abbreviated in a way that it is still recognizable to the cardholder.

Purchase of Goods or Services

For regular purchases of goods and services additional information may be included after the merchant name and an asterisk (*) to indicate an order number, reference number, or other information to identify a transaction.

For vehicle rental and hotel merchants, the merchant name must not be truncated in order to place supplemental information into the merchant name field.

No-Show Transactions

May also include the words “NO SHOW” after the merchant name.

Purchase of an airline Ticket (or passenger railway tickets in the US Region)

Must contain all of the following:

• An abbreviated airline (or US railway) name in the first 11 or 12 positions

• A blank in position 12 if applicable

• Airline (or US railway) ticket identifier beginning position 13