The Future of Bin and Why You Should Care
Long used as the standard for retrieving information on payment cards, six-digit bank identity numbers (BINs) now need to be increased by an additional two digits to accommodate issuer requests for more card numbers.
Issuer can also use credit card bin search for easy way to get numbers online
We strongly advise you to start working with 8-digit BINs as soon as possible because those two digits will have a significant impact on your comprehension of your consumers and how you manage payment operations in the near future.
Bin Background
There are over 22 billion cards in circulation today across all the major payment networks. In the U.S. alone there are over 2 billion cards in circulation with the average American having about 3 in their wallet (2.7 in actuality, but that’s not practical).
The Nilson statistics above make clear that growth trends are not slowing, and the expectation is that there will be 30 billion cards in circulation by 2025.
Relative to expectations set in the 1950s, this level of card issuance can only be seen as incredibly successful.
There is a lot of demand for card numbers from a growing number of banks around the world, and as more individuals become “banked”,
They’ll need a payment card to withdraw money and use their cash, use their card directly, or via their mobile phone.
It became necessary in the 1980s for many issuers to put rules and controls in place to prevent collisions and confusion globally across banks.
In order to coordinate the orderly issuance of cards that can function globally, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) started managing the rules and guidelines for issuing cards.
This prevents—or at least minimizes the chance of—complicated problems where banks in certain countries issue cards that have the same number as banks in other markets.
In our documentation on BIN/IIN Data we note that card numbers are in high demand as more companies want to issue cards.
The ISO has responded by deciding to expand the number space they control on a card from 6 digits to 8 digits which allows the BIN space to expand 10x each time.
Going from 6 to 7 digits increases the possible number of issuer BINs on Visa, for example, from 100,000 to 1,000,000, and going to 8 digits will increase it another 10x to 10,000,000 possible issuer BINs.
This combined with the rest of the digits of the card number should provide banks, financial tech firms, and other companies issuing cards with the ability to provide enough accounts and still keep it manageable across the world.
Meanwhile, smaller banks who don’t need all of their share of a card number range can give some back to the ecosystem.
What does this mean for me?
In short, the challenge with a transition from 6-digit BINs to 8-digit BINs means that there will be more issuers inside the 6-digit space than today (remember adding 2 more digits adds 100x more potential issuers).
More issuers means more card types (credit, debit, prepaid), issuing banks (Chase, Capital One, Citi), and even countries, all associated with the same 6-digit BIN.
This impacts the decisions you are making in your business around routing, fraud, cost analysis, and the like.
Acquirers and issuers directly on the networks also have to get prepared to adjust their routing rules.