The Visa Stop Payment Service (VSPS) lets Visa card issuers stop card-on-file payments (including recurring and installment payments) from being authorized, cleared, and settled. The service is designed to give Visa issuers a method for handling cardholder stop payment requests.
VSPS primarily targets merchant-initiated transactions (MITs), which typically happen after the cardholder has given prior authorization. For example, recurring or installment payments. Customer-initiated transactions (CITs), which are typically one-time purchases initiated directly by the customer, are usually unaffected by standard VSPS configurations.
Issuers may also configure VSPS to apply broader stop instructions, which may potentially block all transactions from a specific merchant, including both MITs and CITs.
Additionally, when managing transactions from wallets like Apple Pay or Google Pay, issuers may rely on device fingerprinting for better control over recurring payments without direct access to card details. This enables effective blocking of future recurring payments associated with the same device or tokenized payment instrument. To make use of VSPS effectively, you should coordinate with issuers to understand how their configurations might influence MITs and CITs. This can help to improve compliance with user preferences and enhance overall transaction management.
If VSPS blocks a transaction, we’ll return a 20012, 200R1, or 200R3 response code, based on the type of stopped payment order. See the full list of Visa response codes.
You can also use the response code returned to help troubleshoot why the transaction was blocked, and use the information to improve the way you handle the issue. For example, you may want to adjust your internal payment processing system, or the information you communicate to the customer. We recommend that you familiarize yourself with the various stop instruction parameters issuers might use, and how they relate to MITs and CITs.