MasterCard Heads-up: “WanTID” Dead or Alive

by Jerry Lake, Integration Manager

If you accept credit cards for your sales, you or someone at your attraction likely knows what a MID is, the Merchant ID. Simply put, the MID is what identifies your business as unique from the literally millions of other businesses who are also trying to request payment via credit card today. Every time you complete a sale in your system involving a credit card, your point-of-sale (POS) system has sent your MID, along with a number of other key pieces of information to your selected payment processor, such as Chase Paymentech.

Some businesses will use multiple MIDs for reporting purposes. For example, you might use one MID for your front-line ticket sales windows, another MID in your gift shop, and another MID for your eComm.

But are you aware of what a TID is?

TID stands for Terminal ID, and is the way to uniquely identify what the card brands often call the “selling lane.” Terminal IDs are generally provided to you by your payment processor, and then configured within your POS application.

In 2013, MasterCard published a largely ignored specification, entitled “Authorization Data Accuracy Card Acceptor Terminal ID.” Simply put, within a MID, if you have more than one selling lane that can accept credit cards (which applies to the vast majority of merchants), the POS terminal must also send a TID that is unique to that selling lane as part of its authorization request. In 2014, MasterCard strengthened the language from “specification” to “mandate,” although there is no evidence of consequences at that time for non-complying merchants. Fast forward to today, and MasterCard has indicated it may start fining non-complying merchants, although the details of those fines are not known.

Pre-EMV, MID and TID configuration was generally done within your POS configuration. Ahead of the mandate, many POS systems already had the ability to pass the TID and MID. However, with the MasterCard mandate, several of the payment providers changed the way the POS system needs to pass the TIDs. You’ll want to check with your POS system provider to ensure your POS is passing those values by current standards.

With many EMV solutions, prior to obtaining your EMV terminals, you should have been provided TIDs from your payment processor, and the MID and unique TID are burned into each terminal as part of the configuration of that device before it was shipped to you, so you likely do not need to do anything.