PURPOSE
The createCardTransaction and hostedPaymentPage requests contain a block for customer data. This exists to satisfy regulatory requirements which only apply to financial institutions.
CAUSE
Merchants who are not aware of the specific use case for the customer data fields may receive an APC_054 - Data invalid or missing error when attempting to send data in the customer block.
SOLUTION
The United Kingdom has a regulation that permits customers to use a debit card to pay outstanding debt for another person. This person is referred to as the payment recipient. For example, a customer can pay the entire balance or part of the balance on a recipient’s payment card or payday loan. To help reduce the high levels of fraud that occur for these kinds of transactions, you must include information about the recipient in the authorisation request. The following fields are required in the United Kingdom for Visa Debit transactions that are processed under merchant category code 6012 (Financial Institutions):
These fields have no bearing on transaction processing otherwise. We therefore recommend not to send any of these data fields, unless your MMC is 6012.