ISO 8583 response code: 01

A referral response asks the acquirer to contact the issuer's authorisation centre by phone and complete the transaction manually. The mechanism predates online authorisation being universal, and survives mostly in card-present retail. In ecommerce there is nobody to make the call, so gateways surface it as a decline and the cardholder is asked for another card.

• The issuer's risk rules flagged the transaction for manual review rather than declining it outright.
• The account is in a state — over limit, newly issued, recently unblocked — that the issuer wants a human to confirm.
• A card-not-present transaction hit a rule written for card-present flows, where a referral is actionable.

1. In ecommerce, treat this as a decline and prompt for a different payment method. There is no automated path that turns a referral into an approval.
2. In card-present retail, call the number your acquirer gives you for voice authorisation and enter the approval code you are given into the terminal.
3. Do not retry the same authorisation automatically. A referral repeated unchanged returns a referral, and repeated attempts against one card can trigger the issuer's velocity rules.

• ISO 8583 05Do not honour
• ISO 8583 62Restricted card

• ISO 8583 message parser

Should I retry a 01 response?

Not automatically, and not unchanged. The issuer has explicitly asked for a human decision, so an identical retry either returns the same referral or starts to look like a card-testing pattern. Ask for another payment method instead.