from Hacker News

Ribbon BIN API – Find out how your customers are paying

by kloncks on 7/23/14, 4:30 PM with 16 comments

• by brryant on 7/23/14, 5:35 PM

  Very cool! But unfortunately the reality is most startups never capture the first 6 numbers of credit cards if they are using a payment gateway (stripe, recurly, etc). Do you have ideas on how we can access the BIN without compromising security if we're using said services?

• by kloncks on 7/23/14, 4:35 PM

  We built this internally for our needs, then decided to give it out to any service that needs similar functionality. The first six cards of any card tells us some interesting information on the identity of the card, such as type (debit/credit), brand (amex, visa), country (US, ES, GA), and issuer bank (chase, wells), etc.

  This would be of good use if you want to do things like, block international cards, charge less for debit cards, or generate more analytics about how you get paid.

  We're giving it away for free for most practical purposes, up to 1,000 requests a day. If you want more, just shoot us an email, hany@ribbon.co

• by zachperret on 7/23/14, 9:01 PM

  This is neat! How does the data differ from http://www.binlist.net/? More current?

• by nijiko on 7/24/14, 12:13 AM

  Way easier and more secure to simply use scripting to do this locally.

• by Atlas on 7/23/14, 6:58 PM

  This is very useful data if you are doing payment aggregation. Per association rules, you cannot discriminate against different card types.

• by robkao on 7/25/14, 11:27 AM

  this is super sweet! will give this a shot in our app.