What are online and offline PINs?

A PIN can sometimes be required as a cardholder verification method for in-person payments. 

It's important to know that there are two types of PIN validations. 

• Offline PIN validation: validated in the card chip itself. 
• Online PIN validation: validated on Adyen’s servers. 

Both PINs must always have the same value.

A physical card can have either online or offline PIN validation preference. Which type of validation is the card’s preference is determined by the card configuration profile. Please reach out to your Adyen contact to find out the specs of your card’s configuration profile.

If the shopper is required to enter their pin, the entered pin will be evaluated against the card preference. However, it is important to remember that for offline payments we can only check against the offline PIN as there is no internet connection available in such a case. It is hard to determine which terminals are operating as offline terminals and which are connected to the Internet. A rough estimate can be if the payment was being made by a merchant that operates in areas with Internet connectivity limitations, such as metro stations, airplanes, intraregional buses, etc. then probably the payment was being made on the offline terminal.