Surely many people know that the first 6 digits of the card number are called a bin, by which you can identify the bank and payment system that issued the cards. But how do banks negotiate the use of bins? How do these conventional 6 digits help payment system participants in practice? And what additional information do they carry? Let's try together to understand the confusing life of the first digits of your card.
Sharing bins between banks
The card number was generated using the service
cardgenerator.io
And, if you can play with the client ID in different ways, then MII and bin play a very significant role when making payments/transfers. Let's look at an example.
Let's imagine that after a hard day at work you go to the store to buy chips. You pay for your moderately healthy purchase with a card from bank A, and the store cooperates with bank B (we’ll smartly call it the acquiring bank). The moment you place your card on the terminal, the acquiring bank wonders whether you have enough money in your account and goes to bank A to clarify this information. This is where the bin comes in handy, allowing Bank B to understand that it needs to knock on Bank A’s door.
Of course, this is a strong simplification of the entire process, but the main thing becomes clear - the bin helps in routing the payment.
To begin with, let’s imagine that one fine evening the guys from IEC and ISO decided that it would be bad if the card numbers of different payment systems were repeated, so we need to somehow distinguish between them. So MasterCard received card numbers starting with 5, and VISA with 4 (in fact, the division is a little more complicated, but, as you already understand, the author likes to simplify).
The next evening, payment systems were already thinking about how to divide the card numbers they had between banks connected to the PS. It was decided to record the first 6 digits for a specific bank. This is how bins appeared.
Well, a correction: in business, nothing comes for nothing, so it’s more likely that these ranges are bought by banks
, and by large banks.
If we count how many unique card numbers of length 16 can be created using one bin, we get several hundred million. It may be possible for giant banks to find enough customers to give them this incredible number of cards. But what should small fintechs do if they would be happy with a couple of million clients? It’s simple - “pinch off” part of the bin from a great friend, so in the business world banks appear as BIN sponsors, which allocate part of their range of cards to fintechs.
With the development of fintechs and other small financial institutions, there was a need to more often “pinch off” part of the range from large banks, so in April 2022, MasterCard and VISA, under the influence of ISO, switched to 8-digit bins.
The card number was generated using the service
cardgenerator.io
And here we can dig deeper and say that the bin determines not only the name of the bank that issued the card, but also the country, type of card (debit, credit card, etc.) and level (black, platinum, or business).
And to aggregate all this information, bin tables or range tables were invented quite a long time ago. This is what they look like:
This is an excerpt from the official MasterCard bin table (you can download it at
www.mastercard.us
, where you can also see the values of all columns)
From this piece of the table you can see that the ranges mainly differ after the 8th symbol. Although there are some exceptions, for example, Russian bins did not have time to fully translate into 8 characters and they remained 6-digit in the table. There are still a lot of interesting things there, if you want to figure it out, then write - we’ll look together in the comments
Of course, such tables are supported by the PS and all banks and merchants use them. But we’ll talk about what they are used for below.
Transaction troubleshooting is our favorite routing, but we have not yet discussed Fraud redaction (fraud reduction). Here the bins will help us identify unreliable operations, or rather, find operations that require additional verification.
Many algorithms can be used for such a task. The simplest and most obvious: compare the country of the bank that issued the card and the country of the IP address of the device from which the payment is made. Although in our age of globalization, paying for products in Turkey with a Georgian card is not a rare case, for banks this is still a place where you need to be on guard.
Payments made with prepaid cards will also require special attention. To receive such cards, you do not need a passport, contract or bank account, so payment systems will know practically nothing about you when making a transaction, and therefore may be more likely to refuse a purchase/transfer.
Whether the card is prepaid can be determined by the highlighted columns.
We will combine the last two points from VISA, enhanced checkout experience and customer service efficiencies, essentially they are both about improving the payment experience. So what can bins help us with here?
For example, they can help create loyalty and rate programs. If a bank sees that many clients are transferring money to Greece, then it can be happy and, if it wants to increase this cash flow, offer clients bonuses for such transfers. Or, on the contrary, they may be afraid of the outflow of money and introduce additional commissions. In general, any analytics on card transactions becomes a hundred times easier using bins.
Another beautiful use of a bin or part of it is noticeable when entering a card number in a payment form. Ever wondered how the icon of the payment system and/or even your card bank is displayed there? I think now it will not be difficult for you to answer this question. Let's look at the example of the boosty payment form:
It is interesting to observe that different PSs require a different number of symbols to define it. For example, all cards starting with 4 are assigned to a visa, so even one number is enough to highlight the PS emblem.
Here is an example of using an entire bin in the Tinkoff application to identify a bank:
Optimizations are possible here, but in any case, now you know that at the moment the PS or bank logo was displayed, the front went to the bin table or its equivalent and checked everything there.
In general, all uses of bins come down to one single goal - to simplify and optimize the interaction between participants in payment systems, because everything that we discussed above can be achieved through requests from banks to PS or from one bank to another, but this will significantly increase the number of in queries in already highly loaded systems.
And instead of an afterword, I suggest you speculate:
Sharing bins between banks
What is a bin and why is it needed?
First, let's take a closer look at the card in your wallet. Most likely, its number has 16 digits and some of them have special meaning for payment systems:- The very first digit – MII (Major Industry Identifier) determines which industries/institutions the card belongs to, these can be financial institutions, banks, airlines, merchants.
- The first 6 (okay, actually 8, but more on that below) are the BIN (bank identification number), which allows payment system participants to find out which bank issued the card.
- It can also be called IIS (Issuer Identification Number), but IIS is a broader concept and not necessary for our conversation.
- Next are the numbers identifying the card in the bank, and in fact, additional logic can be added to them at the request of the bank
- The last digit is usually a verification number. We’ll talk about this verification number another time
The card number was generated using the service
Valid Visa Credit Card Generator | Generate Unlimited Visa Card Numbers
Don't prefer to showcase or reveal your real financial details? Don't worry & try our free & valid Visa Credit Card Generator tool.
cardgenerator.io
Let's imagine that after a hard day at work you go to the store to buy chips. You pay for your moderately healthy purchase with a card from bank A, and the store cooperates with bank B (we’ll smartly call it the acquiring bank). The moment you place your card on the terminal, the acquiring bank wonders whether you have enough money in your account and goes to bank A to clarify this information. This is where the bin comes in handy, allowing Bank B to understand that it needs to knock on Bank A’s door.
Of course, this is a strong simplification of the entire process, but the main thing becomes clear - the bin helps in routing the payment.
How do banks agree on who uses which bins?
In fact, this is determined, of course, not by banks, but by international standards that are invented by smart people from IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) and ISO (International Organization for Standardization), and payment systems (MasterCard, VISA, etc.).To begin with, let’s imagine that one fine evening the guys from IEC and ISO decided that it would be bad if the card numbers of different payment systems were repeated, so we need to somehow distinguish between them. So MasterCard received card numbers starting with 5, and VISA with 4 (in fact, the division is a little more complicated, but, as you already understand, the author likes to simplify).
The next evening, payment systems were already thinking about how to divide the card numbers they had between banks connected to the PS. It was decided to record the first 6 digits for a specific bank. This is how bins appeared.
Well, a correction: in business, nothing comes for nothing, so it’s more likely that these ranges are bought by banks
, and by large banks.If we count how many unique card numbers of length 16 can be created using one bin, we get several hundred million. It may be possible for giant banks to find enough customers to give them this incredible number of cards. But what should small fintechs do if they would be happy with a couple of million clients? It’s simple - “pinch off” part of the bin from a great friend, so in the business world banks appear as BIN sponsors, which allocate part of their range of cards to fintechs.
With the development of fintechs and other small financial institutions, there was a need to more often “pinch off” part of the range from large banks, so in April 2022, MasterCard and VISA, under the influence of ISO, switched to 8-digit bins.
Transition to 8-digit bins and bin tables
The logic with 8-digit bins is the same, it’s just that the ranges of possible card numbers become smaller, about 5 million cards per bin.
The card number was generated using the service
Valid Visa Credit Card Generator | Generate Unlimited Visa Card Numbers
Don't prefer to showcase or reveal your real financial details? Don't worry & try our free & valid Visa Credit Card Generator tool.
cardgenerator.io
And to aggregate all this information, bin tables or range tables were invented quite a long time ago. This is what they look like:
This is an excerpt from the official MasterCard bin table (you can download it at
Mastercard BIN Checker | BIN Range Lookup Table
Stay up-to-date with valid Mastercard BINs with the Simplified BIN Account Range Table to end erroneous declines due to use of inaccurate BIN & account range information.
From this piece of the table you can see that the ranges mainly differ after the 8th symbol. Although there are some exceptions, for example, Russian bins did not have time to fully translate into 8 characters and they remained 6-digit in the table. There are still a lot of interesting things there, if you want to figure it out, then write - we’ll look together in the comments
Of course, such tables are supported by the PS and all banks and merchants use them. But we’ll talk about what they are used for below.
Where else are bins used?
We have already said that bins greatly help in routing transfers, but this is far from their only function. According to VISA, the main ways to use the bin are as follows:
Transaction troubleshooting is our favorite routing, but we have not yet discussed Fraud redaction (fraud reduction). Here the bins will help us identify unreliable operations, or rather, find operations that require additional verification.
Many algorithms can be used for such a task. The simplest and most obvious: compare the country of the bank that issued the card and the country of the IP address of the device from which the payment is made. Although in our age of globalization, paying for products in Turkey with a Georgian card is not a rare case, for banks this is still a place where you need to be on guard.
Payments made with prepaid cards will also require special attention. To receive such cards, you do not need a passport, contract or bank account, so payment systems will know practically nothing about you when making a transaction, and therefore may be more likely to refuse a purchase/transfer.
Whether the card is prepaid can be determined by the highlighted columns.
We will combine the last two points from VISA, enhanced checkout experience and customer service efficiencies, essentially they are both about improving the payment experience. So what can bins help us with here?
For example, they can help create loyalty and rate programs. If a bank sees that many clients are transferring money to Greece, then it can be happy and, if it wants to increase this cash flow, offer clients bonuses for such transfers. Or, on the contrary, they may be afraid of the outflow of money and introduce additional commissions. In general, any analytics on card transactions becomes a hundred times easier using bins.
Another beautiful use of a bin or part of it is noticeable when entering a card number in a payment form. Ever wondered how the icon of the payment system and/or even your card bank is displayed there? I think now it will not be difficult for you to answer this question. Let's look at the example of the boosty payment form:
It is interesting to observe that different PSs require a different number of symbols to define it. For example, all cards starting with 4 are assigned to a visa, so even one number is enough to highlight the PS emblem.
Here is an example of using an entire bin in the Tinkoff application to identify a bank:
Optimizations are possible here, but in any case, now you know that at the moment the PS or bank logo was displayed, the front went to the bin table or its equivalent and checked everything there.
In general, all uses of bins come down to one single goal - to simplify and optimize the interaction between participants in payment systems, because everything that we discussed above can be achieved through requests from banks to PS or from one bank to another, but this will significantly increase the number of in queries in already highly loaded systems.
And instead of an afterword, I suggest you speculate:
- What other ways to use bins are/can you think of?
- How can you easily and without unnecessary worries understand that the user has entered an incorrect card number? (most likely this has something to do with the last digit of the card number)
