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A Payment Account Reference (PAR) is a unique value linked to each Primary Account Number (PAN), which is the card number printed on the card. According to RBI regulations, only card networks and issuing banks can store card details. However, many use cases require identifying a card without storing its actual details, such as:
  • Targeted promotions
  • Risk assessments
PAR addresses this requirement by providing a unique one-to-one identifier for each card, ensuring consistency whilst remaining compliant.

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Use cases for PAR

You can use PAR for the following purposes:
  • Offers and loyalty: Merchants can use PAR to verify offer availability, such as ensuring that an offer can be availed only once per card.
    • Example: HDFC Bank Visa Credit Card offers a 10% discount on flight bookings, valid once a week.
  • Risk management: Merchants can use PAR to gather data on transaction patterns, analyse potential risks, and build custom risk checks, such as limiting transaction amount or number of transaction attempts per day.
    • Example: A specific card can only be used to purchase gift cards up to a maximum amount of INR 20,000 per month.

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Cashfree’s PAR as a service

Cashfree provides APIs to help you use PAR effectively.

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Get PAR before a transaction

Retrieve PAR against a plain card or saved card before initiating a transaction. Use Get PAR API to get the corresponding PAR by passing plain card details to Cashfree. This works for all major card schemes such as Visa, Mastercard, RuPay, American Express, and Diners. 
curl --location 'https://api.cashfree.com/pg/utilities/pars' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--header 'X-client-id: <x-client-id>' \
--header 'X-client-secret: <x-client-secret>' \
--header 'x-api-version: 2025-01-01' \
--header 'x-request-id: sIP3A1Vi9swEi8KF02cU' \
--data '{
    "card_number": "4111111111111111",
    "card_cvv": "123",
    "card_expiry_mm": "12",
    "card_expiry_yy": "27",
    "card_type": "PLAIN_CARD"
}'
When you fetch saved cards from Cashfree to display on your checkout, the Get All Saved Card Instrument API includes PAR in the response. Once a card is tokenised, the Card Token Webhook also sends the PAR.

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Get PAR for completed transactions

Retrieve the PAR of the card used for a successful transaction, by passing a transaction identifier as input in Get Payments for Order API or Get Payment by Transaction ID API. This can be used for reconciliation purposes.

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FAQs

This is a request-based feature, available only to PCI-DSS-compliant merchants. To enable it, reach out to your account manager or use the raise an issue support form.
Cashfree-hosted Checkout merchants use Cashfree’s Offer Engine to run offers. To set up risk checks, merchants leverage Cashfree’s RiskShield solution. Both offerings allow merchants to set up offer targeting strategies and risk rules through a self-serve flow on the Cashfree Merchant Dashboard, making implementation easy and effective.