ERPB work on transparency for retail payments

Consumers, sometimes, when they read their card or account statement, have trouble with a transaction, because they don’t recognise the name of the merchant, or the location, or the date of the purchase.

In order to improve this situation and to reduce the number of cases where consumers fail to identify a payment, in July 2020, the Euro Retail Payments Board (ERPB) set up a working group on transparency for retail payment end-users. The ECSG actively contributed by sending participants from its different sectors. The group made a set of recommendations (available here) that were endorsed by the ERPB in June 2021.

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Recommendations

1. Consistently use commercial trade name and provide this name to all involved parties in the payment chain for use in client’s payment account statements.
2. Collect commercial trade name from payees and enable payees with tools to maintain up to date configuration data
3. Keep the payee’s commercial trade name in transaction data
4. Include commercial trade name of both ultimate payee and of intermediary platforms when necessary. Special keywords such as ”booked via”, “your order from”, “payment processed for” may be used.
5. Use standards and applications suitable for including identified data sets “end-to-end”. Upgrade or change these standards when necessary.
6. Indicate exact geographical location where a physical purchase was made.
7. Indicate commercial trade name as displayed on the website or the commercial trade name of the online merchant for online purchases. The merchant’s country should also be indicated whenever is possible
8. Indicate relevant transaction date
9. Include commercial trade name, geographical location of payees and transaction date in the payment account statement.
10. [Payment Schemes] Proactively ensure that their scheme rules encourage all the relevant recommendations to the largest extent possible.
11. [Payees, Payee’s PSPs and Payer’s PSPs] Proactively engage with the whole sector, beyond existing membership to carry out an impact assessment by October 2021 to define a timeline for implementation of maximum 3 years of these recommendations, and report back to the ERPB on a half-year basis.

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From November 2021 to June 2022 an impact assessment was carried out to verify the status of the recommendations implementation, check the validity of the different timelines, and identify any issues.

In parallel to the expansion of scope and to the change of name to EPSG, the association is currently working to include the recommendations in the SEPA Card Standardisation Volume, in particular in its books 2 (Functional Requirements), 6 (Implementation Guidelines) and 7 (Processing Framework).