Special Transaction Scenarios

Here we list a variety of scenarios when it comes to credit card transactions being made you might come across which are not immediately obvious why they happen.

Amount changes between PENDING and CONFIRMED states

It can happen that the amount of a credit card transaction changes between the first encounter of the transaction in our system (status PENDING) and the final confirmation of the same transaction (status CONFIRMED). This case is usually seen within the travel segment with gas/petrol stations or rental car agencies.

The reason is that the merchant blocks a certain amount of money upfront to the final invoicing of the service purchased. The blocked amount of money acts as a security deposit for the merchant or if it is not 100% clear what the exact amount to be eventually paid will be.

In those scenarios you will see a transaction about for instance 100 EUR in the PENDING state of the transaction, and once this transaction gets confirmed, the amount changes to 86.34 EUR. This means 100 EUR were originally blocked by the merchant on the card, the actual purchase then has the amount of 86.34 EUR which then is the final amount of the transaction.

Transactions being split after PENDING state

This is a subcategory of the scenario above. The merchant also blocks a specific amount on the credit card, say 510 EUR. This resembles already the amount of the transaction, but the actual purchase contains in this example two positions. For instance airlines typically do that when you buy multiple tickets in one go. They split the credit card transaction later then into the two individual tickets.

In this case you will see the following transactions:

• One PENDING transaction of 510 EUR
• Once this transaction gets CONFIRMED, the amount changes to 255 EUR (half the original amount)
• A second transaction appears from the same merchant about 255 EUR (the second half of the purchase), which directly switches to status CONFIRMED.