Ribbon BIN API – Find out how your customers are paying | Hacker News Reader

Ribbon BIN API – Find out how your customers are paying

bins.ribbon.co

41 pointskloncks16 comments

Very cool! But unfortunately the reality is most startups never capture the first 6 numbers of credit cards if they are using a payment gateway (stripe, recurly, etc). Do you have ideas on how we can access the BIN without compromising security if we're using said services?

Hi, I'm David, one of the engineers at Ribbon.

If you use any payment gateway, you need to send the full credit card number from the client so the gateway can return a token that identifies the card in their vault.

You can do the same and write some JS to get the first 6 numbers and send a GET request to our API without compromising security. The BIN (first 6 numbers of credit cards) is not considered the primary account number so it's safe to send (and even store).

Can I store a BIN and associate it to a customer without breaking PCI compliance?

You're allowed to store up to the first six and last four digits of a credit card number without encryption.

https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/pci_dss_v2.pd..., PCI DSS 3.3 would seem to be the most applicable section here.

I use it on the client side to show a country icon and credit card issuer, and use Stripe on the backend.

Think most startups collect BINs. Its easily to have javascript grab the first 6 digits. You already have code that validates the card with luhn check and also determine card type, grab the first 6 characters and stick it in a hidden field.

We built this internally for our needs, then decided to give it out to any service that needs similar functionality. The first six cards of any card tells us some interesting information on the identity of the card, such as type (debit/credit), brand (amex, visa), country (US, ES, GA), and issuer bank (chase, wells), etc.

This would be of good use if you want to do things like, block international cards, charge less for debit cards, or generate more analytics about how you get paid.

We're giving it away for free for most practical purposes, up to 1,000 requests a day. If you want more, just shoot us an email, hany@ribbon.co

Where do you get the BIN data?

A bunch of different sources, including some bank databases. We also have to update it regularly.

This is neat! How does the data differ from http://www.binlist.net/? More current?

Bigger database, more current, more updated, easier to deal with, among other things :)

Way easier and more secure to simply use scripting to do this locally.

This is very useful data if you are doing payment aggregation. Per association rules, you cannot discriminate against different card types.

We charge less for debits vs credits, rather than giving a different fee for Visa vs MasterCard.

this is super sweet! will give this a shot in our app.

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