Industry Standard - Electronic Receipts/Record

This might be something that involves too many parties in the banking world, and may not be of use for all countries (where paper receipts are still sadly king).

It strikes me that if MasterCard / Visa / Amex supported the ability to encode an email address on the chip/ magnetic strip, it would then be possible to facilitate electronic receipt distribution by default, either by:

  • industry / regulatory acceptable receipts from MasterCard/visa/Amex, and/or:
  • the availability of the above point then introduces the possibility for POS systems to push email PDF/tiff receipts direct from the vendor.

Thoughts?

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Sounds like a good idea to me. But I don’t see it as likely to happen.

To be honest I don’t think the majority of card users would want an email for every little purchase they made, so if it were to become a feature, it would need to be opt in.

I think the email - or direct receipt embedded within the Monzo app would
could be useful - and while I understand the clutter argument, most email
clients are pretty easy to set up with a rule / tag / label to route them
directly to a non-inbox folder.

Perhaps a user-defined threshold would be feasible to capture of receipts
in the inbox (ie discarding all transaction receipts below £X. I think it
would make life a damned sight easier - imagine no longer having to look
for receipts for warranty purposes, no more cluttered wallets, back
pockets, accidentally washed and mangled receipts!

Anywho - best thing about a suggestion is it can be dismissed :slight_smile:

I like the basic idea but the proposed implementation is a big NOPE for me. I have very little trust in merchants and would not want them to have even the possibility of receiving information I did not explicitly give them. You just know that retailers would find a way to turn simple receipts in to a mailing list and upsell opportunity, or leak/sell email addresses to spammers. American retailers already can’t be trusted to keep magstripe data secure!

I would somehow do this as a token sent along with the payment information that an issuer can optionally return to a service to retrieve the digital receipt. That way the merchant never receives any personal information unless it is given (using methods such as loyalty cards). This method would also retain compatibility with tokenised, private payment systems such as Apple Pay or Android Pay.

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Richard - very much like the tokenised approach; meets GDPR requirements, prevents merchant spamming (hadn’t thought of that).

Thanks for engaging.

Cheers

1 Like