Initiating Transaction Copy Requests

When cardholders do not recognize a charge on their credit card account statements, they typically contact their card issuers and request a copy of the transaction at issue to help determine whether or not the charge is valid. When a card issuer receives such a request, their representative will first try to answer the cardholder's questions and attempt to establish the facts surrounding the transaction. If this cannot be done, the card issuer will electronically send a "request for copy" (also knows as a "retrieval request") to the merchant processing bank (also known as merchant bank, acquiring bank or Acquirer) that provides merchant services to the establishment that has generated the transaction. If the transaction receipts that the merchant generates are stored at their merchant processing bank, the bank will fulfill the retrieval request and the merchant will never find out about it. If, however, the merchant stores its own transaction receipts, the merchant processing bank will forward the retrieval request to the merchant. The merchant then must produce a legible copy of the transaction receipt and submit it to the merchant processing bank within a certain time frame. The merchant processing bank will then send the transaction copy on to the card issuer. The process of producing and submitting a copy of a transaction receipt is also known as representment. The following posts will describe this process in details.