Overview

Parrot by Pagos is an API-driven microservice that provides detailed bank and market data for the payment cards your customers transact with. Using a simple HTTPS request, you can submit the six or eight digit bank identifier number (BIN)—also known as an Issuer Identification number (IIN)—for a customer's card to the Parrot application programming interface (API). Parrot will then return information about the card type and brand, the bank that issued it, and details of the market it was issued in, such as currency, country, and time zone. At an additional cost, you can request enhanced data for a BIN.

BIN data can help you better understand both your customers and their preferred payment cards. With this added context, you can design and implement a payments strategy that benefits your bottom line and improves the checkout experience for your customers. For examples of how to get started, check out our integration guides.

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Parrot doesn't have a test environment. Instead, we offer a free trial for Parrot, which allows you to test out the service and the data it provides.

Sign Up

Create a free trial account to get started with Parrot. With your free account, you can query our service up to 500 times over 30 days.

To learn more about how BINs work, check out our BIN / IIN Data guide.

Generate an API Key

After you create an account, open the Parrot Service Panel to generate an API Key:

Click API Keys in the navigation bar.
Click Create API key to add a new key to your account.

You'll provide this API key in the x-api-key header when you make your first BIN request to Parrot. Parrot uses this value alone to authenticate your request to our servers; you don't need to provide a password. For more information on how the Pagos platform uses API keys, see our API Keys guide.

Look Up a BIN

You're now ready to query for a BIN! We recommend using cURL on the command line to submit API requests to Parrot, but you can also use API query tools like Postman. Here’s a cURL example for details on BIN 55630400

curl -H "x-api-key: 882fff1cfe3d4e6b9f218f249c324afb" "https://parrotv2.prod.pagosapi.com/cards?bin=55630400"

This will return the details for the BIN:

{
     "card": {
         "number": {
             "length": 16,
             "luhn": true
         },
         "network": "MASTERCARD",
         "type": "CREDIT",
         "product": "",
         "bank": {
             "name": "CITIBANK (SOUTH DAKOTA), N.A.",
             "phone": "1-605-331-2626",
             "url": "www.citigroup.com"
         },
         "country": {
             "alpha2": "US",
             "numeric": "840",
             "name": "United States"
         }
     }
 }

Card Product ID and Name

When available, we will provide the details around the card product ID and the card product name – this will denote the type of card typically present on the BIN. More details are available in the BIN / IIN Product Code Guide.

Enhanced Data

For an additional cost, you can submit enhanced data BIN requests to Parrot. Enhanced data includes:

Interchange Regulated - The estimated interchange costs for transactions made with the associated payment card
SCA Regulated - Whether or not the card holder needs to provide two forms of identification to their bank to make purchases with the payment card, as dictated by Strong Customer Authentication (SCA)
Durbin - Whether or not the payment card is regulated by the Durbin Amendment, a US law that regulates interchange fees for cards issued by large banks
Additional Networks - A list of all networks available for the requested BIN