Avoiding Awkward Conversations

We've all been there. Checking the credit card or bank statement can sometimes be like doing the Times Crossword. With the explosion of contactless, and the demise of cash as a default payment tool, we are using our cards much more frequently and for much smaller transactions than before, and its often difficult to keep track of our spending.

Unfortunately the 'rails' upon which these systems run, have to use the analogy, not changed literally since the steam age. Much of the processing networks were designed in an era where bandwidth and latency were major concerns, so often the narrative fields used to identify merchants are opaque and quite often just plain wrong - how many times have we seen an entry where the statement read that we made a transaction in Dublin or Amsterdam when all we did was buy a snack in London!

The results can be needless calls to the bank, or merchant, and disputes that take weeks to resolve, and often a loss of trust in the payment system we need to be totally predictable,

Fortunately for our customers, help is at hand. By using AI and machine learned PoS locations and mobile triangulation, we can enrich transaction information 'in the moment' and also in statements to capture retailers precise location, Google Map and Street view and disambiguate the 'logical address' of the merchant from the actual transaction location. Especially valuable in identifying foreign spending or in unfamiliar locations.

For those of us who share our account with multiple cardholders, as in joint accounts or business accounts its one more way of avoiding those 'awkward conversations'.

Gordon McKenzie is Managing Director of Ondot Systems for EMEA.