# Payment Account Management
source: https://developer.mastercard.com/payment-account-management/documentation/index.md

The Payment Acount Management (PAM) API can be used to uniformly perform account lifecycle management on accounts held across different Mastercard systems such as Automatic Billing Updater (ABU), Payment Account Reference (PAR), and Mastercard Digital Enablement Service (MDES), which will also update associated tokens.

In addition, the PAM API provides the ability to PAR, when a Primary Account (PAN) or MDES Token is provided. PAR can be leveraged as a unique identifier which links the PAN and affiliated MDES tokens. Issuers and processors can now leverage PAR as part of their card personalization process to include PAR in the EMV tag of their physical cards as well as in the personalization profile in the digital wallets. This will reduce a merchant's and acquirer's risk of data compromise and fraud commonly associated with the storage and exposure of an actual PAN.Today, token requestors have to provide a cardholder's Primary Account Number (PAN) to process the transaction. Over time, acquirers and merchants can replace stored PANs with PARs to link the token transactions to consumer accounts.

## Benefits {#benefits}

* Supports account-level lifecycle management of three Mastercard systems using just one API.
* Allows issuers to stop fraudulent transactions by closing the accounts related to a PAR and deleting a token.
* Reduces risk of data compromise; issuers are less likely to need to manage data compromise events and customer dissatisfaction from the inconvenience of such events.
* Reduces the likelyhood of failed transactions by keeping the token details updated.

## How It Works {#how-it-works}

PAM allows you to manage payment accounts including:

* adding a new account in ABU.
* generating and inquiring about the Payment Account Reference (PAR).
* updating an account's parameters in ABU, MDES, and PAR.
* closing an account in ABU and deleting the subsequent PAR and tokens.
* deleting an account from the Mastercard systems.

![High-level flow diagram of PAM and related APIs](https://static.developer.mastercard.com/content/payment-account-management/documentation/img/img.png)

### Account Lifecycle Management Flow {#account-lifecycle-management-flow}

1. Issuers send an account lifecycle update to PAM API.
2. PAM API posts this update to the PAR Vault, ABU, and MDES systems.
3. Each of these systems consume the lifecycle update and send the acknowledgement or status back to the PAM API.
4. Issuers can optionally request the status of the account lifecycle update from the PAM API.

### Inquire/Generate Payment Account Reference Flow {#inquiregenerate-payment-account-reference-flow}

1. Issuer sends a get PAR request with the account or token details to the PAM API.
2. PAM API will inquire the PAR Vault to fulfill the request.
3. PAM API will then return the PAR in the response to the Issuer bor generate one based on the request.

For more information on how to use PAM API for account lifecycle management and to inquire or generate PAR, refer to the [Use Case](https://developer.mastercard.com/payment-account-management/documentation/use-cases/index.md) section.