Billing descriptors play an important role in prevention alert functionality. A billing descriptor describes a payment and helps a cardholder identify the transaction on his or her bank statement.
Billing descriptors are what Ethoca and Verifi use to issue prevention alerts. Your processor will have a “main descriptor” on file. However, a single billing descriptor typically has several different variations. Your descriptor may change based on many different things such as the type of transaction you process (card-present, card-not-present), the card brand that issued the card (Mastercard, Visa), the type of card used to process the transaction (debit, credit), etc.
It is important to enroll all possible variations. We suggest you process a couple of test transactions with different cards issued by different brands to see how your descriptors display.
If a descriptor variation isn’t enrolled, you may not receive the most complete protection.