# Overview of card push transfers

_To use Card Push Transfers, reach out to [support@increase.com](mailto:support@increase.com)._

Card Push Transfers move funds between your Increase account and an eligible
Visa or Mastercard payment card within seconds. The funds are available
instantly on the recipient’s end.

## Target reach

Card Push Transfers can be used to push funds to billions of eligible Visa and
Mastercard cards, both domestically and internationally. Supported cards are
primarily debit cards.

## Use cases

Visa Direct and Mastercard Send support dozens of use cases for sending funds to
both consumers and businesses.

Examples include:

- Worker payouts, such as instant payroll, contractor payments, or tip
  disbursements
- Consumer payouts, such as employee reimbursements and insurance claim
  repayments
- Small business payouts, such as merchant settlements, marketplace payouts, and
  loan disbursements
- Overall money movement between two consumers

## Networks

Increase utilizes our direct card network connections over redundant, leased
line connectivity[^visa-redundancy] to provide a best-in-class push-to-card experience directly
with the card networks. This ensures full support of any card network features
and complete pass-through of the information available in the acquiring
messages.

## Underlying implementation

Push-to-card transfers, often called Original Credit Transactions (OCTs), are
implemented as additional functionality on top of the authorization, clearing,
and settlement functionality that the card networks already support for regular
purchase processing. You can think of them as instantaneous refunds, with a few
key differences:

- Whereas a regular purchase or refund can be sent as either an 0100
  authorization message followed by a clearing message or an 0200 full financial
  message depending on the acquirer, a push-to-card transfer is always a 0200
  full financial, with the funds moving instantly.
- Push-to-card 0200s are not reversible, as the issuer is required to make the
  funds available within seconds.

Under the hood, even though the issuer makes funds available as soon as they receive the 0200
message from the network, actual movement of funds still happen daily over
Fedwire using Visa’s regular net settlement process.

## Integration

Integrating with the Increase API for Card Push Transfers involves three main
concepts:

- [Card Tokens](/documentation/api/card-tokens), which are card numbers collected from your customers that you aim
  to push funds to
- [Card Validations](/documentation/api/card-validations), which are $0 network messages sent to the issuer to ensure
  that the card number is valid and that the cardholder is who they claim to be
- [Card Push Transfers](/documentation/api/card-push-transfers), which push funds to eligible cards

From a high level, your integration would do the following:

1. Collect a customer’s card number and [create a Card
   Token](/documentation/creating-card-tokens). If you’re Payment Card Industry
   Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS) compliant you can do this directly,
   otherwise you’ll likely make use of a tokenization provider. You then forward
   the card number to us at https://vault.increase.com/card_tokens.
2. Check that the card number belongs to a BIN/card range that supports
   push-to-card by calling the [Card Token
   Capabilities](/documentation/api/card-tokens#retrieve-the-capabilities-of-a-card-token)
   endpoint.
3. If it does, you then proceed by [sending a Card
   Validation](/documentation/sending-card-validations) to confirm with the issuing
   bank that the card number is valid and that the name and address of the
   cardholder matches what they’ve provided you.
4. Once confirmed, you [send a Card Push
   Transfer](/documentation/sending-card-transfers) to push funds to the card.

If you later want to push funds to the same card again you only need to
repeat step 4.

[^visa-redundancy]: https://increase.com/articles/visa-redundancy