What is a Payment Account Reference

A Payment Account Reference (PAR) is a unique, persistent identifier used to link a cardholder's payment card(s) to their account with a financial institution. It's an essential component in modern payment systems, particularly for tokenization and securing transactions.

Unlike a card's Primary Account Number (PAN), which can change when a card is reissued (e.g., due to expiration or being lost), the PAR remains constant. This persistence is what makes it so useful.

The main purpose of a PAR is to provide a consistent reference for a payment account across multiple transactions and payment tokens, even if the underlying physical card details change.

You can use a PAR for various purposes, including fraud detection, analytics, bonus fraud detection, and loyalty programs.

How to receive a PAR

Getting the Payment Account Reference (PAR) from BR-DGE is straightforward and can be achieved through two primary methods.

• Directly from the API response when a transaction is processed.
• Utilising Network Tokens via BR-DGE.

Payment Processor PARs

For Payment Processors that support PARs, BR-DGE return you the PAR in the transaction response. This allows you to automatically retrieve and store the PAR as part of your normal payment processing workflow.

Please see the table below for an overview of Payment Processors that the PAR will be returned from.

Supported Payment Processors

To find out if you can receive the PAR as part of normal transaction processing check out the table below to see if your PSP is currently supported.

If your PSP is not currently supported please reach out to our support teamto discuss your requirements.

Network Tokenisation PARs

When you provision a network token for a card-on-file, the PAR is included in the tokenization response.

To receive the PAR via Network Tokenisation you must first be enrolled with the card networks to provision Network Tokens via BR-DGE. If you are not yet configured for Network Tokenisation, please reach out to our support team to discuss onboarding and configuration.

Once Network Tokenisation is enabled on your Retail Channel(s) you can receive the PAR for the underlying account in the networkToken.paymentAccountReference field of a BR-DGE card-on-file.

...
"networkToken": {
    "id": "61XJzB_BQ9qa29nGa7JZrQ000000000000US",
    "token": "5299920000000149",
    "expiryDate": "12-99",
    "issuer": "VISA",
    "status": "ACTIVE",
    "tokenUniqueReference": "DM4MMC0000000001cd2826c715b7475bb089b7622366ebe4",
    "paymentAccountReference": "5001EUMYTT3AESCZGUEC77KPCLETI",
    "lastFour": 0149,
    "cardBin": "001234",
    "cardLastFour": "1234",
    "cardExpiryDate": "12-34",
    "cardIssuer": "Bank of BR-DGE"
  },
...

Check out the Create a Card on File endpoint in our API reference documentation for more information, including examples and the request/response schema.

Support

For support with Payment Account References, or any other queries please get in contact with our support team.