What is Visa's stored credential framework?

Visa’s stored credential framework was introduced in 2017 in response to the growing number of merchants and digital wallets storing payment credentials and using them for future purchases.

In November 2025, Visa introduced new assessments (fees) to ensure the correct flagging of stored credential transactions. 

What is a stored credential?

If you store a cardholder’s card number or other information for faster checkout on returning purchases or for use in subsequent Merchant Initiated Transactions, this is a stored credential. Visa considers all network token transactions as stored credentials as we return a stored token in the payment response.

How to comply with the framework

Whenever you store a cardholder’s details for future use, including when processing an initial transaction using a network token, you must:

1. Submit the payment with a property to indicate that you’re storing the cardholder’s details. For our Flow integration, set store_payment_details to enabled or collect_consent, and for all other integrations, set store_for_future_use as true.
2. Alternatively, you can set up an unscheduled payment agreement when storing the cardholder’s details to ensure the stored information is valid.
3. Follow the schemes’ disclosure requirements for subscriptions and unscheduled transactions if you intend to use the stored credentials for these purposes.
4. If you’re in Europe, you must also follow the EU’s disclosure requirements.
5. If the issuer declines the first authorization where you request to store details, do not use the stored credentials for subsequent transactions until you’ve successfully authorized them.
6. For following Merchant Initiated Transactions such as subscriptions, recurring, or unscheduled transactions, ensure you provide the previous_payment_id. This is the id we return in the response for the first transaction in the series and helps the issuer link the subsequent payment to the initial one.

If you don’t provide a previous_payment_id for subsequent Merchant Initiated Transactions, we’ll attempt to locate the one from the original transaction and send this on your behalf. However, we don’t recommend relying on this fallback for your recurring transactions.

The benefits

As well as helping your business follow scheme rules and avoid fees, issuers are more likely to authorize stored card payments that follow the framework. 

If you need advice or support with your stored credentials integration, please don’t hesitate to contact us, we’ll be happy to help.