Payment Account Reference (PAR)

What it is

The Payment Account Reference (PAR) is a 29-character, non-financial value that links every tokenised credential and the underlying PAN to a single funding account, without exposing the PAN itself. It lets merchants and processors correlate transactions across device tokens, card-on-file tokens and the physical card for loyalty, analytics and dispute matching.

Where it appears

Provisioned with the credential; returned by the card / token and carried to the acquirer.

Specification reference

Defined in: EMVCo Payment Tokenisation Specification / EMV Book 3, Annex A (Payment Account Reference)

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