Address Verification System (AVS)

The Address Verification System (AVS) is a service that verifies if a billing address matches the address of a credit card cardholder. AVS is a widely used fraud-prevention measure for Card Not Present (CNP) transactions, such as online payments or point-of-sale Mail Order/Telephone Order (MOTO) payments.
AVS gives you a way to check if the shopper who is placing the order is the same person as the cardholder, which is more likely if the billing address details match.

How does AVS work?

When a shopper pays for a transaction, you can collect their billing address details. Then, you send that data in the billingAddress object in the payment authorization request. When you have enabled AVS, the system checks if and to what extent these billing address details match the information that the issuing bank has on file about the holder of the credit card.

The response to the payment request will contain an Adyen AVS response code that is mapped to a raw AVS response code. You can see the mapping in the mapping table.

When the AVS check results in a mismatch, you can trigger a risk rule. In classic risk profiles, you can use the standard risk rule Billing address does not match cardholder address, or you can create a custom risk rule. Based on the AVS response, you can decide what to do with the payment: you can accept, make an exception, or cancel a transaction.

AVS is supported for card payments with Visa, Mastercard, Discover or American Express. Credit card issuers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Europe (Visa only) must support AVS verification requests when you send them in, however, using AVS is not mandatory for you as a merchant.

Enable and test AVS

To be able to trigger AVS and the AVS risk rules, you set up your payment authorization requests to include billing address details. How you do that depends on your integration. Follow the instructions below that are relevant for you.

AVS in API requests

1. Collect the shopper's billing address.

   • Checkout: Make sure that you collect the shopper's billing address details to include them in the payment request. If you are using a client-side integration for Web, the Web Drop-in and Card Component can be configured to collect your shopper's billing address.
   • Classic integration: Make sure that you collect the shopper's billing address details to include them in the /authorise request.

2. Send the collected billing address information in the payment authorization request. Provide the full address of the shopper using the billingAddress child element:

   • When you submit the billingAddress object for AVS, the following child elements are required:

   Field	Type	Required	Description
   country	String		The country value format needs to adhere to the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard. An invalid country code results in a transaction/request rejection. You can look up country codes on the ISO website.
   city	String		The name of the city.
   street	String		The name of the street.
   houseNumberOrName	String		The number or name of the house.
   postalCode	String		A maximum of five digits for an address in the US, or a maximum of ten characters for an address in all other countries/regions.
   stateOrProvince	String		Required for for shoppers from the UK, US or Canada. Provide the child element stateOrProvince as defined in ISO 3166-2. For example, CA in the US or ON for Canada. AVS does not validate stateOrProvince.

   • Pass address lines, like apartment or unit number, as part of street.
   • If you do not know the country/region or are not collecting the country/region from the shopper, provide country as ZZ.

   To qualify for better interchange rates submit the billing address and ZIP code for card not present transactions. This is not guaranteed, contact Support Team to learn more.

Test AVS results

To test your system's response to receiving an avsResult:

1. Use our provided AVS test cards and billing addresses or create your own test cards.
2. Include and define all the required billingAddress parameters.
3. Set the value of street to Test AVS result.
4. Set the value of houseNumberOrName to the AVS response code that you want to test from the mapping table. This table shows AVS response codes returned by Adyen, which are mapped to raw AVS response codes from acquirers.

Use AVS risk rules

When you are using the classic risk engine, you can use and configure the standard consistency risk rule Billing address does not match cardholder address (AVS).

Alternatively, you can configure custom risk rules using AVS responses. In your custom rule, for the field avsResponseCode, you can use the Adyen response values from the mapping table to define the risk rule behavior.

When you are using the latest risk engine, you can create custom AVS rules.

AVS responses and mapping

Different card brands and networks have specific AVS response codes. Many of them are mapped to the response codes that you receive from Adyen. We also have a number of Adyen AVS response codes to accommodate acquirers that send in slightly different raw AVS responses.

For the mapping of AVS results for point-of-sale MOTO transactions with AVS, refer to AVS responses for point of sale.

If you prefer to receive the actual response code from the card or network, you can turn these on in your Customer Area:

1. Log in to your Customer Area.
2. Go to Developers > Additional data.
3. Select the Acquirer result and Raw acquirer result checkboxes.
4. Select Save configuration.

See also