API/Service to retrieve Country of Issue for credit cards

Question

can you point me to an API or online service that can return the country of issue (i.e. where the credit card has been issued) starting from the credit card number?

I am not looking for a "free" solution, this will be a corporate app so it's ok if this is offered by some broker company like Bibit or Easycash for a fee - but so far I didn't find any and I hope someone can point me directly to the appropriate service.

Answer 1

MaxMind's API should do this

• http://www.maxmind.com/app/ccv_overview
• http://www.maxmind.com/app/ccv#bin_checks

but there's probably plenty more, and perhaps something more focussed - I was manning a stand at a trade fair once (pre-3D Secure) and got approached by 3-4 people offering credit card services to reduce the risk of chargebacks so there is (or was) a market for this.

Also found this one

• http://www.bindatabase.net/

which appears to be a user-contributed style one but needs captchas for manual queries - I guess you'd have to contact them for scriptable access. (Which seems a bit cheeky if they want to charge you for access to their user-contributed data, but maybe they don't. If they were going to charge you'd think they'd buy ISO 7812 and updates and do some research themselves.)

Answer 2

See this article. Algorithm is relatively simple, so it does not warrant a full-blown API, IMO.