May 9, 2023

Upgrades to authorization expiration timing

Lithic has implemented upgrades to our authorization expiration logic, which will be rolled out over the next few weeks. These upgrades will more accurately reflect the status of a transaction to our customers - specifically whether an authorization is still outstanding or whether it has been expired.

As described in our documentation, each dual-message transaction - whether a purchase authorization or a credit authorization - contains an authorization validity window. This window indicates how many days a merchant has to clear (or settle) an outstanding authorization. After this window passes, the Lithic platform will generate an authorization expiry, which will appear in the events array in the transaction object as an AUTHORIZATION_EXPIRY event.

This change better incorporates data elements provided in incoming messages from the card networks to reflect a more accurate authorization validity window for a given transaction. The impact to customers from this change is that cardholder funds can be released or held in a manner closer in line with network guidance based on the latest transaction status provided in the transaction object.