In this season of #TheShot, we look at one of the smallest pieces of data in a card payment and one of the most influential: the BIN, or Bank Identification Number. The first digits of a card tell the system the card type, the card product, where it was issued and by which institution. Those attributes trigger routing, risk assessment and the cost of every transaction.
Our guest is Sandra Mianda, Founder & CEO of Paypr.work, a payments consultancy. Sandra explains why the industry moved from 6-digit to 8-digit BINs, why longer BINs have not ended classification problems, and why BIN tables that are rarely updated quietly erode approval rates and margins.
For PSPs, PayFacs, ISOs and ISVs, BIN data is shared infrastructure: every merchant on the platform inherits the quality of its BIN tables. Keeping that data current, and acting on it in routing, authentication and retries, is part of running payments for merchants, not a one-off configuration task.