ISO8583: Appropriate value for Field 43 Card acceptor name/location

Question

Hey In 43'th field of ISO-8583 package which is Card acceptor name/location (1-23 address 24-36 city 37-38 state 39-40 country), should I assign value ? and what is the proper value?

Answer 1

Field 43 is card acceptor name and location, it's in the form of

Merchant name & location                 US

where merchant name & loc is fixed length of 38 and iso 2-letter country code is last two chars, and it's not a TLV

TLV tags are in the form of and tag id and tag value length and are typically of fixed size between 1 to 4 as defined by the implementation spec (but not necessarily, it may get complicated depending on the exact implementation spec, for example "if tag ID starts with F then it's of length 4 else its of length 2")

[tag id][tag value length][tag value]

for example tag 82FE containing "foo" in a tag id length of 4 and tag value length of 4 implementation would be written as

82FE003foo

but the exact look will depend on your spec

Answer 2

Field 43 is as @bbozo described traditionally Card Acceptor name and location though with a general standard format and is sometime referred to interchangably with REG-E address; but it is not.

It is also not a TLV field as there are no tags defined in ISO-8583 (any version) for it. A 3rd party entity could stray from ISO specification and define it as TLV, but if they do you need to clarify if it is text TLV, BER-TLV, or another TLV variant.

Returning to the usage of DE43 the usage varies greatly, but depending on the specific ISO-8583 flavor it has different formatting. The standard one is generally: Position 1-23 Address or Merchant Name Position 24-36 City Position 37-38 State/Region (ISO-3166 Alpha 2) Position 39-40 Country (ISO-3166 Alpha 2)

That said I looking at recently about 200 million unique transactions and found about 260k unique values of the field for a particular client after ignoring things like ticket number or customer IDs that sometimes come in the field such as something like VRZN 999-999-9999.

VISA & MasterCard each have slight variants of the first two sub-fields as well by a single character length. Some regional switch formats also format it differently.

Prime variants I see are for P2P/OCT transfer and for Airline tickets; both of which contain specific details of the purchase similar to a wireless bill, but with a very specific format. Those contain specific captialized letters like "XFER", "VISA TRANSFER", and a couple other variants.

I see the state code all over the field and the only thing relatively consistent is the country code.

Lastly some regional networks put the merchant name in DE048 and put the physical address in DE043 and so you won't get all of the info in just DE043 but have to look at both to get the merchant name. VISA & MasterCard do not use DE048 though for that purpose.