Mastercard's Transaction Processing Excellence (TPE) program offers these Merchant Advice Codes (MAC)s. They are a set of codes that Mastercard supports to enable issuers to communicate additional information regarding a transaction response. These codes indicate further actions on subsequent transactions that TabaPay Clients should take to continue serving cardholders.

The purpose of these TPE programs is to identify unfavorable transaction processing behavior and drive positive processing behavior change, resulting in a more seamless network experience for all parties involved.

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Program Fees

Program fees will be assessed under the Mastercard Transaction Processing Excellence (TPE program) if certain processing behaviors are breached during Authorization.

Use Cases

• Recurring / Subscription Payments: Use MAC values to determine when to retry recurring transactions (e.g., retry after X hours/days), improving approval rates while avoiding unnecessary declines.
• Card Expiry or Replacement: Apply MAC 01 (New account information available) to prompt cardholders to update their payment method when a card has expired, been reissued, or upgraded.
• Identify Do Not Retry / Account Closed: Respect MAC 03 (Do not try again) to prevent repeated declines on closed or fraudulent accounts, reducing fees and operational costs.
• Prepaid & Single-Use Cards: Leverage MAC values 40 and 41 to notify customers that non-reloadable prepaid or single-use VCN cards are not suitable for ongoing purchases, encouraging them to add a new payment source.
• Temporary Failures: Follow retry guidance with MAC values like 24–30 to reattempt at defined intervals (1 hour, 24 hours, 2 days, etc.), improving approval rates without harming issuer relationships.
• Fraud / Security Declines: Respect MAC values linked to fraud/suspected misuse (83 with MAC 03), ensuring you do not retry risky transactions and signaling the customer for another payment method.

Why Use MAC?

• The ability to optimize approval rate performance.
• Lower operational costs associated with submitting unnecessary authorization requests.
• Improved management of subscription services.
• The MACs give merchants that accept non-reloadable prepaid and single-use VCN cards the opportunity to inform their customers using these products for ongoing purchases that a replacement payment source should be added to ensure uninterrupted service.

Where to Find MAC

MAC will be returned in:

• Create Transaction Response from transactions performed using a Mastercard payment credential.
• Query Card with AVS, or ANI.

{
  "SC": 200,
  "EC": "0",
  "transactionID": "TabaPay_TransactionID_",
  "network": "MasterCard",
  "networkID": "123454646545645",
  "networkRC": "00",
  "status": "ERROR",
  "approvalCode": "000000",
  "additional": {
   "par": "5001005642207382549510767179",
   "codeMAC": "02"
  }
}

{
  ...
   "bin": "222300",
    "last4": "2300",
    "nameFI": "FORD Instiution"
  },
  "AVS": {
    "avsID": "Q78rZrISCc3jeQORXlWtBg",
    "networkRC": "33",
    "networkID": "501419181602",
    "authorizeID": "181602",
    "codeAVS": "Y",
    "codeSecurityCode": "M",
    "par": "V0010013022073812195104907179",
    "codeMAC": "01",
    "ANI": {
      "codeMatch": "M",
      "codeFullName": "M",
      "codeFirstName": "M",
      "codeLastName": "M"
    }
  }
}

Note: For Query Card, the response includes Network Response Code 33: Expired card

MAC Values

Changes to Return Codes

MasterCard's Authorization Optimizer introduced three new values: • 79 (Lifecycle [Mastercard use only]) • 82 (Policy [Mastercard use only]) • 83 (Fraud/Security [Mastercard use only])

These values replace the previously returned network response codes below:

Network Return Code and Merchant Advice Code

TabaPay Clients consuming MACs can apply the following logic to take better decision.

Examples of Network Response Code and Merchant Advice Code

The following table includes further examples of combined Network Response codes, MAC Codes, and descriptions.