More changes to receipts

John Mayleben, MRA’s vice president, technology and product development, writes a monthly column on retail technology. Contact John at jmayleben@retailers.com.

In previous columns I have written about the federal Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) and the limitations placed on what may appear on the customer’s credit or debit card receipt. For an update on FACTA, see the “Update from Washington” on page 6.

But in addition to the legislative limitations, merchants are bound by their agreements with Visa and MasterCard in terms of their receipts.

Recently MasterCard announced a number of changes to its rules concerning both the customer copy and the merchant copy of receipts that are printed with an electronic printer, from either your terminal or your POS system. These changes are a result of the continued pressure to secure cardholder data and eliminate opportunities for “bad guys” to gain access to the customer’s personal information.

Effective October 1, 2008, any “cardholder receipts generated by an electronic point-of-sale device” must not display anything more than the last four digits of the card number—this is not new. But now, the preceding 12 digits must be filled with characters that are not blanks or numeric characters.

Most systems have been set up to display the truncated numbers as “x” or “*” or “#”, but some systems have simply deleted either all of the numbers or the first 12. For example:

No longer acceptable: 5555
Acceptable: ************5555

In addition to this tweak, the merchant copy of the sales draft will no longer be allowed to display the expiration date of the customer’s card.

If you are currently using a printer that generates a receipt on carbonless paper and it already prints a non-numerical character for the truncated numbers and does not display the expiration date, you won’t need to make any changes.

If your system uses a thermal printer and your store copy shows the expiration date, you need to make changes to your system’s programming.

Your credit card processor or POS system support people should be able to change the programming to be compliant with these changes with just a download of new programming or setting certain parameters within your systems. If MRA is your processor and your terminal needs adjustment to comply with these requirements, call Customer Service at 800.366.3699.