The ANI advice charge is not a fee that appears on your personal bank or credit card statement. ANI stands for Account Name Inquiry, a fraud-prevention service from Visa (and now Mastercard) that lets a merchant check whether the name a customer enters matches the name the issuing bank has on file for the card. The per-inquiry cost is billed to the merchant through its payment processor, not to the cardholder.1Swipesum. Visa Account Name Inquiry ANI Fee
What ANI Actually Does
Account Name Inquiry is a non-financial, zero-dollar authorization request supported by Visa and Mastercard.2Marqeta. Account Name Inquiry When you register a card on a platform or send money to someone through a card-based transfer, the merchant can submit your first, middle, and last name along with the card number, expiration date, and CVV2 to the card network.3Visa. Account Name Inquiry One Sheet – Merchant Version The network passes it to your bank, which compares the submitted name to its records and returns a result: match, partial match, or no match.4TabaPay. Account Name Inquiry
Visa and Discover return individual match codes for first, middle, and last name plus an overall code; Mastercard returns a single full-name result.4TabaPay. Account Name Inquiry A full match might let the transaction go through automatically. A partial match might prompt extra verification. A no-match may block it.
The point of the check is to catch two kinds of fraud: account takeovers, where someone uses stolen card credentials, and authorized push payment scams, where a victim is tricked into sending money to a fraudster’s account. If the name on the request doesn’t match the name on the account, the merchant or sender gets flagged before the money moves.5Visa. Visa Direct Fighting Payment Fraud
Why You Won’t See It on Your Statement
ANI is a merchant-side cost. Visa charges the merchant’s payment processor per inquiry, and the processor passes the cost through to the merchant.1Swipesum. Visa Account Name Inquiry ANI Fee No part of that fee is billed to you.
What you may occasionally notice is a zero-dollar authorization hold on your account when a merchant runs a verification. These are temporary, carry no monetary value, and typically drop off within a few days. They are not charges.
So if you landed here because of a line item on your statement labeled with the letters “ANI” or something similar, the ANI service is almost certainly not the source. The charge you’re looking at is coming from somewhere else, and the next section explains what to do about it.
What the Merchant Pays
For readers on the merchant side of this question, Visa originally priced ANI at $0.05 per inquiry when the service launched. In April 2024 the fee doubled to $0.10 per inquiry.1Swipesum. Visa Account Name Inquiry ANI Fee6Verisave. April 2024 Processing Rate and Rule Updates Merchants on interchange-plus pricing will see the fee itemized on their processing statements. Merchants on flat-rate pricing may not see it broken out, though it still factors into their overall processing cost. The fee is mandatory and not negotiable.
Each ANI request on a Visa card also triggers a standard account verification billable event, with an additional charge when ANI actually performs the name match, whether the result is a success, partial match, or failure.7TabaPay. Account Name Inquiry FAQ
ANI itself is not turned on by default. A merchant has to ask its acquirer or payment service provider to activate it.3Visa. Account Name Inquiry One Sheet – Merchant Version A few technical constraints are worth knowing: at minimum the last name must be submitted; only personal names work (not business or company names); suffixes like “Jr.” and prefixes like “Dr.” are not supported; and each name field is capped at 35 characters for Visa.7TabaPay. Account Name Inquiry FAQ ANI also doesn’t work on business cards, commercial cards, or non-reloadable prepaid cards where no name is tied to the account.
One other thing merchants should understand: an ANI match carries no liability protection. If a merchant approves a transaction based on a positive name match and it turns out to be fraudulent, the merchant still bears the loss.7TabaPay. Account Name Inquiry FAQ The result is informational, not a guarantee. ANI also does not screen names against anti-money-laundering or sanctions lists.3Visa. Account Name Inquiry One Sheet – Merchant Version
If You See a Charge You Don’t Recognize
Because ANI itself won’t appear on your statement, an unrecognized charge is a different problem, and federal law gives you tools to deal with it.
For credit cards, the Fair Credit Billing Act caps your liability for unauthorized charges at $50. The law requires card issuers to investigate written disputes filed within 60 days of the statement date and to resolve them within two billing cycles, or at most 90 days.8Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. How Do I Dispute a Charge on My Credit Card Bill
For debit cards, the Electronic Fund Transfer Act caps your liability at $50 if you report the unauthorized transaction within two business days of learning about it. The cap rises to $500 if you report within 60 days.9Justia. Credit Card Fraud Waiting longer than that can mean losing the protection altogether on debit transactions.
In both cases the first move is the same: contact your card issuer promptly, in writing where possible, and ask them to open a dispute. If you want to understand how your personal information is being used in the verification process, Visa’s own guidance is to contact your card issuer or the merchant, since Visa typically acts as a data processor on their behalf.10Visa. Global Privacy Notice