Cartes Bancaires (CB)

Cartes Bancaires is France’s local card network. More than 95% of these cards are co-branded with either Visa or Mastercard, meaning you can process these cards over either Cartes Bancaires or the Visa or Mastercard networks.

Cartes Bancaires will likely have a positive effect on your acceptance rate in France. If a charge is declined on the Cartes Bancaires network for a technical reason, Stripe automatically retries the charge on Visa or Mastercard’s networks.

As with Visa and Mastercard, cardholders can dispute Cartes Bancaires charges. Because Cartes Bancaires dispute rules are more stringent, there are fewer reasons that a cardholder can dispute a charge, which on average leads to a lower dispute rate compared to Visa and Mastercard for many of our merchants. Merchants cannot contest Cartes Bancaires disputes - the dispute fee is 0 Euro on Cartes Bancaires.

Availability

Only merchants located in the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) have Cartes Bancaires available. If your business isn’t based in France, Cartes Bancaires won’t be fully enabled until your account has processed 50 EUR from Cartes Bancaires eligible cards. French Stripe accounts with the “type of business” set as “Particulier / Micro-entrepreneur / Auto-entrepreneur” are eligible for Cartes Bancaires after providing their business tax id in the dashboard settings.

Integration

If you can already accept card payments, you can accept Cartes Bancaires! Read through the Card Brand Choice guide to learn how to best handle customer priority selection and to find multiple test cards that you can use to test your integration as soon as it’s active. If you require a specific card network to process a payment, you can specify this using Card Brand Choice. If you require that Cartes Bancaires is never the default network for any payments, please contact support.