Level 3 Data is the golden goose of the payment industry. It allows your business to reduce the fees of card processing, get better rates, gain business intelligence into your company’s spend to meet statutory tax obligations and run your business using data. How does that sound?
What is Level 3 Data Processing?
Level 3 data processing is for merchants that can provide their payment processor with a significant additional information on the actual product or service such as line items, product codes, item description, unit price etc…
Businesses of any size that are currently accepting credit and debit card payments and processing payments through a point-of-sale terminal, mobile card reader like Square or PayPal’s Triangle, or a payment gateway can benefit from having access to Level 3 Data.
Some of those benefits include;
- Lower Payment Processing Costs
- Faster Account Settlements
- More Customers, More Sales
More on each below.
3 Levels of Data for Data Processing
You are by default set up for Level 1 payment processing. The lowest level with the highest fees. Level 3 is the pinnacle you should be aiming for in order to reduce the fees and rates of processing payments by as much as 50%. Yes you can halve your payment processing fees by using Veryfi for your data extraction and providing Level3 data to your payment processor.
The Levels Defined
Level 1 Data
Any merchant who accepts credit cards complies with this level. It functions as a normal credit card and is authorized and associated with normal transaction data.*
Merchant’s name
Purchase amount
Date
Billing zip code
Level 2 Data
Additional data regarding the actual sales such as tax, customer code, purchase number, invoice number etc. is captured at the point of sale. Most of the time it is combined with the merchants information such as Tax ID number, state and postal code data.*
Everything from Level 1
Sales tax amount
Tax indicator
Customer code
Merchant postal code
Merchant tax id
Invoice number
Order number
Level 3 Data
Significant additional information on the actual product or service is shared such as line items, product codes, item description, unit price and quantities as well as shipping postal code data are needed in addition to the Level 2 requirements.*
Everything from Level 1 & 2
Item commodity code
Product/SKU description
Product code
Unit price
Quantity
Unit of measure (each)
Extended price
Line items totals
Debit/credit indicator
Discount amount
Freight/shipping amount
Duty amount
* Card Transaction Descriptions provided by Wikipedia.
Who is Level 3 Data Processing for?
- Bill Payment Companies: enable real-time customer bill payment, reduce costs of your transactions and expedite transaction processing.
- AP Finance Teams: digitize your back office through automation that works for you 24×7 while keeping costs low.
- New Generation of Expense Management Companies: focusing on hotel folios and business intelligence to encourage smarter employee spend and transparency across the organization.
If you need data to make smarter business decisions, then look no further.
Merchant benefits
Data unlocks new opportunities! Some of those are incentives like savings all the way to new insights for smarter data driven decision making.
Lower Payment Processing Costs
Level 3 payment processing from any payment processor (Eg. MasterCard, Stripe) qualifies for substantially lower interchange rates than Levels 1 or 2. The reason for this is fraud reduction. More data, less risk to the payment processor. In exchange you can get a saving of one-percent just by using Level 3. Over the year this adds up to savings in the thousands!
Faster Account Settlements
Level 3 data processing of payments to settle accounts yields much faster turnaround time because the processor has enough information to validate the transaction. You are also at this point a low risk merchant and get queue priority.
More Customers, More Sales
The world is changing and customers demand a higher level of security and data privacy. Especially if those are government institutions requiring FedRAMP, ITAR or NIST compliance. Without Level 3 data processing you are missing out on the growing customer base and failing to stay with the times in a fast moving world.
Customer benefits
Integrating Level 3 line item detail into your ERP system or an accounting system brings value to your customers through:
Automated Data Entry
Elimination of the biggest burden in accounting / ERP platforms, manual data entry of Level 3 data for transaction processing!
Reduced Fees
Lowers transaction fees which makes your ERP or accounting system more valuable.
Sales Opportunities
Your customers can now sell to any customer with a purchase card or to a government agency.
Additionally…
Tax Reporting
Monitor internal spend for easier tax reporting.
Business Intelligence
Control employee spend through allowance policies, daily quotas, merchant-specific restrictions, etc.
Speed
Time is Money. Track transactions from inception to settlement.
Traditional methods suck
Doing this using machines is hard. It requires businesses to venture into the machine vision and machine learning territory which very few companies have the knowledge, skills and resources to maintain and train the AI.
Therefore; traditionally Level 3 data extraction has been done using:
- Humans end to end or human-in-the-loop sacrificing customer’s personal identifiable information (PII) for a wizard of Oz approach or
- Using templates for each vendor. This is not only a time burden to maintain hundreds of templates for each vendor invoice but if the vendor updates their invoice it’s a chore that leads to customer frustrations why the processing of the payment failed.
Don’t worry, there is a much faster, hands free and data privacy safe method called Veryfi.
See it for yourself 👇
Try it below or contact us on sales@veryfi.com
Have Questions? Email us sales@veryfi.com
