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;
More on each below.
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.
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
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
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.
If you need data to make smarter business decisions, then look no further.
Data unlocks new opportunities! Some of those are incentives like savings all the way to new insights for smarter data driven decision making.
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!
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.
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.
Integrating Level 3 line item detail into your ERP system or an accounting system brings value to your customers through:
Elimination of the biggest burden in accounting / ERP platforms, manual data entry of Level 3 data for transaction processing!
Lowers transaction fees which makes your ERP or accounting system more valuable.
Your customers can now sell to any customer with a purchase card or to a government agency.
Monitor internal spend for easier tax reporting.
Control employee spend through allowance policies, daily quotas, merchant-specific restrictions, etc.
Time is Money. Track transactions from inception to settlement.
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:
Don’t worry, there is a much faster, hands free and data privacy safe method called Veryfi.
Try it below or contact us on sales@veryfi.com
Have Questions? Email us sales@veryfi.com
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