Overview

Validate+ is an optional service that provides additional verification of an EFT account number. Forte performs these “preauthorization” searches (also called “checks," but should not be confused with a financial “check”) automatically for subscribing merchants (the authorization messages require no additional fields).

 

Validate+ Account Verification

The Validate+ service consults the status reported by the bank to see if the customer account is valid and in good standing. The response indicates if the account is open and valid, closed, NSF, or one of the other conditions listed in the table below. Charges are only assessed for transactions involving participating banks (Most Tier I and II banks participate, but some local banks and smaller credit unions may not). Transactions that do not receive a definitive response (such as POSor NEG) may then be checked against the national negative check database. Note that the status of the account may change between the bank’s report and settlement.

 

Using Validate+

Validate+ transactions yield up to four additional response fields (see below). The most important field is pg_preauth_result, which indicates the result of the verification. POS indicates a positive response from the verification service and NEG indicates a negative response. UNK indicates that nothing is known about the account (for various reasons). Use the following response fields when performing Validate+ transactions:

• pg_preauth_result: The value in this field may cause a transaction to be declined, depending upon the setup. Potential values for this field include the following: POS, NEG, or UNK.
• pg_preauth_description - This field displays the current state of the account as provided by the verifying agent.
• pg_preauth_neg_report - This field indicates negative database responses and normally contains the negative report details and (usually) the name and phone number of the reporting entity.

 

Response Values

Forte returns the following values in the result and description fields listed above. Sandbox normally generates a POS result for any account (no participating bank check is performed). The test account numbers below may be used on Sandbox (with any valid ABA number) to force the indicated response.

 

Result	Description	Test Account #
NEG	P15:HIGH RISK	99915
UNK	P50:NO INFO	99950
POS	P70:VALIDATED	99970
POS	P71:LOW RISK APPROVAL	99971
POS	P73:MEDIUM RISK APPROVAL	99973
UNK	P80:PREAUTH VENDOR BUSY	99980
UNK	P90:PREAUTH VENDOR UNAVAIL	99990
UNK	P91:PREAUTH VENDOR ERROR	99991
UNK	P92:PREAUTH SERVER UNAVAIL	99992
NEG	P99:DECLINE

Approval and Validate+

Validate+ is only run for sale, authorize, and verify transactions (AGI transaction types 20, 21 and 26). Transactions with a NEG result are normally declined (depending on the merchant’s configuration). Those with UNK and POS results are not declined and may be subject to other checks. If the merchant only uses verify, instead of declining all NEG responses, the pg_preauth_result value may be used instead for any decision making.

Authorization and Validate+

Within the Forte platform, merchants can configure how specific negative ACH items are handled. If the final response is positive, UNK, or the account is not found, the transaction must be APPROVED in all cases. If the final response has negative reports, the transaction is typically DECLINED, but this is dependent on the merchant’s specific configuration.