How PAR Enhances Customer Experience, Prevents Fraud, and Boosts Loyalty

Imagine effortlessly tracking purchases across every sales channel, running smarter loyalty programs, and uncovering actionable insights into buyer behavior—all without compromising the security benefits and continuity of tokenization. This is the promise of Payment Account Reference (PAR), a secure transaction identification system introduced by EMVCo in 2017. By linking Primary Account Numbers (PANs) with associated tokens, PAR enables merchants to monitor fraud, track customer behavior, and improve loyalty programs while ensuring the security of their customers’ sensitive payment data.

On behalf of everyone at IXOPAY, I am excited to announce the launch of our PAR solution for merchants of all sizes and industries! PAR is set to transform payment security and data handling, offering significant benefits for customer relationship management, risk monitoring, and even PCI scope reduction. IXOPAY’s revolutionary PAR solution centralizes payment data across all channels, allowing you to enhance your customer experience, reduce fraud, and adhere to compliance needs—all without handling sensitive PAN data.

Our PAR solution fits into the “Payment Insights and Performance” wedge of the five categories that make up IXOPAY’s payment orchestration platform. By working with IXOPAY, merchants across retail, hospitality, travel, and other industries gain another tool in their arsenal to unify data operations and empower key decision-making, giving them a leading edge over their competition.

In order to help you understand the business value PAR offers merchants, here is a breakdown of everything you need to know about the challenges PAR addresses, its use cases, and its business benefits. 

Made up of 29 alphanumeric characters, PAR is a non-financial identifier that cannot be used to transact. The data point is assigned one-to-one with a PAN and one-to-many with tokens, enabling merchants to link all transactions and tokens originating from the same cardholder account. 

A good metaphor for Payment Account Reference (PAR) is a tracking number for a package. Just like a tracking number stays the same regardless of the various methods of transportation used across its shipping journey, PAR remains consistent across different payment methods and sales channels. So, no matter if the package is flown overnight, driven to a distribution center, and then handed off to a local carrier, the tracking number is always attached, allowing the recipient visibility into their delivery.

Similarly, PAR provides a consistent identifier for a payment account across transactions whether they are made online, in-store, or using a digital wallet or physical card. This tracking improves the usefulness of payment data without exposing actual card numbers.

Merchants today face a frustrating dilemma: the same security measure designed to protect payment information has obscured necessary insights into buyer behavior. By masking payment account numbers with indecipherable codes, tokenization has indeed cut down on fraud—yet it’s also left merchants with fragmented data across various purchasing channels. Linking this fragmented data together is the key to realizing benefits like tracking customer purchasing behavior, building customer profiles, and offering personalized buying experiences. 

By tying transactions and tokens back to the cardholder account, PAR transforms otherwise meaningless payment data into business insights. 

Better Customer Service

PAR equips customer service teams with a 360-degree view of customer behavior across all purchasing channels and payment methods. Even if the customer only provides details for a single transaction, the support representative can retrieve a full transaction history based on the PAR. This complete picture allows for more tailored service, faster dispute resolution, and better refund tracking.

Optimized Loyalty and Rewards Programs

With improved visibility into buyer behavior, merchants can tailor loyalty programs and offers to cater to customer preferences. For example, a customer orders takeout from a pizza restaurant’s app and pays with their mobile wallet. A few days later, they order dine-in Italian cuisine and pay with the same card. Both channels are within the same restaurant group, so the merchant automatically enrolls the customer in a loyalty program. The customer can continue to earn points without even having to present a loyalty card each time they order.

Risk & Fraud Scoring

PAR can identify whether a transaction originates from an existing customer without any other inputs. This enhances customer intelligence while controlling for specific types of fraud, like multi-account or promotional fraud. In practice, this could look like a cardholder who repeatedly disputes legitimate transactions to get a refund, a practice known as friendly fraud. The cardholder creates a new user account with each attempt. Even though they deleted and re-added their card to their digital wallet to generate new tokens each time, the transactions can be linked.

PCI Scope Mitigation

Because PAR is a non-financial reference value that cannot initiate transactions, it can be safely transmitted and stored within merchant systems so that merchants can identify cardholders without resorting to PAN storage. By using PAR for non-payment purposes, merchants can reduce the number of systems and processes within their system that must comply with PCI standards.

To say I am excited about this launch is an understatement, and I can’t wait to see all the uses our clients come up with for PAR. As the payment landscape continues to evolve, PAR will empower merchants with deeper insights, stronger fraud protection, and greater flexibility in managing customer relationships. This is just the beginning of a more seamless and secure future for payments, and I’m eager to see how businesses leverage PAR to drive innovation and growth.

For more information on how PAR can help you track purchasing behavior, download our latest white paper, Enhancing Customer Experiences with Payment Data.