Card payments
COS Card Payments
Cross River's Card Payments solution has two key capabilities:
Instant Disbursements (push-to-card) for payouts, refunds, and earnings, and
Instant Funding (pull-from-card) that lets customers load wallets or accounts directly from their debit cards. Transactions flow through participating card networks for near real-time funds availability.
What Cross River offers
Payment types
- Push payment: A push payment sends funds directly to a recipient's eligible debit, credit, or prepaid card. The transaction originates from your platform and, via Cross River, "pushes" money to the cardholder's account. Funds are typically available to the cardholder in real-time or near real-time. Visa calls this OCT (Original Credit Transaction).
- Pull transactions: A pull transaction debits funds from a cardholder's eligible debit or prepaid card to fund a wallet or account on COS. The cardholder authorizes your platform to "pull" money from their card.
Payment options
- Partial payment authorization: When a pull-from-card transaction exceeds the cardholder's available balance, Cross River's partial authorization capability allows platforms to capture available funds and let customers pay the difference with another payment method—reducing abandonment and improving customer experience.
- Flexible attributes for partners with submerchants: Send different business types (BAI codes), statement descriptors, CAIDs, or MCC codes all in a single program as approved by the card networks. Cross River uses a few shared Bank Identification Numbers (BINs) for all of these activities, allowing partners to receive the benefits that come with large volume discounts.
Payment security
- Risk detection: Cross River designs its risk detection services to protect online card payments. Our aim is to provide our partners with peace of mind while they conduct digital transactions. Our services include:
- Token Validation Service
- Address Verification Service (AVS)
- Account Name Inquiry (ANI)
- CVV Verification (Card Verification Value)
- Tokenization: Cross River uses tokens to secure debit card numbers. Stored by the merchant, a token is proprietary and identifies a card in place of an actual card number. Cross River's tokenization allows merchants to securely access payment credentials without storing PANs (Primary Account Numbers). This is compliant with PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), the set of standards established by the PCI Security Standards Council to protect environments where payment data is stored, processed, or transmitted. By replacing sensitive cardholder data with non-reversible tokens, Cross River reduces partners' PCI DSS compliance scope.
- Card authorization and compliance: P2C processing complies with PCI standards to ensure that sensitive credit card information is protected. Cross River uses only encrypted token information throughout our system. Any card number we use to transfer funds is meant for temporary access only during a transaction request.
What’s new
We are migrating these card payment APIs to the Crossriver Core system (COS), where all the other payment rails (ACH, wire, etc) live. This provides a more seamless customer experience, due to the single connection to all our API banking services across all rails. The advantages of this migration include:
- Standardization: Moving to a standardized platform results in standardized integrations to third-party platforms, eliminating the manual bespoke workarounds in various platforms. Not only are these manual workarounds a pain point for our partners, but they also add points of potential failure, resulting in a lot of overhead and upkeep. In addition, because the Account Management APIs also live in COS, migrating from P2PE to COS will also increase speed and reduce the latency related to calling COS and waiting for a response on card limits.
- Scalability: Moving to COS increases scalability. Partners would be able to easily increase their volumes, due to the robust COS infrastructure. Another reason for this increased scalability is the introduction of asynchronous APIs, which are faster because of their increased throughput and ability to handle many requests in parallel.
- Accessibility: Lastly, migrating from PTPE to COS will make all the other payment rails and services more accessible with all the APIs hosted in the same place.
For more information, please see the API specs and the migration tutorial:
Partner impact
Partners are recommended to migrate from the old PTPE Card Payments APIs to the new COS Card Payment APIs so they can gain all the benefits of our COS.
Cross River will provide proper guidance to aid partners with their migrations, including but not limited to:
- Joint Integration Testing
- E2E Testing
- Dedicated Support Engineers