I absolutely love the near real-time’ness of the transaction notifications and it got me thinking that leveraging it might be useful in the use case of linked cards. e.g.
Family groups where one or more parents have issued cards to their children and the one or both parents receive a notification not just to view the transaction, but to catch it in-flight and accept or reject it.
You could set up rules around the notifications/authorisations like granting autonomy for individual transaction limits up to a certain value, aggregate daily limits, and then do the notification/authorisation when the transaction breached those limits.
I know your focus is on getting the fundamentals right at the moment, just thought this could be an interesting roadmap feature and potentially a USP.
I was thinking about the possibility for real-time authorisations in the context of high-risk transactions … But I’m not sure what the allowable delay is when your card is in a POS terminal, how can the flow wait in the “authorising” step before it times out.
Linked / joint / family accounts is definitely on the roadmap, although some way down the line.
Trying to get user input to accept/reject a payment is problematic, because we only have a few hundred milliseconds to reply to the MasterCard auth message. But certainly letting parents set spending rules for their kids is something we’ll look at in future.
@tom: makes sense - the time limit was something I was interested in.
Perhaps for transactions over the limit, the parent could preauthorize the payment on their own account - flagging that the child can spend up to X over the next Y period of time - overriding the usual spending rules. This could also be used to block spending.
Then it’d probably be good for the parent to be notified of any blocked payments, and maybe a summary of card usage at the end of the day too.
I think this could work well for company spending too. This is probably a more long term thing, but would be nice for you to think about for the future.
It’s pretty common that I need to set things up for my company, which at some point usually involves setting up card details. At the moment, it’s a bit of a hassle to do that, as it relies on Freddy and I being in the same office at the same time.
It’d be cool if a “company account” could delegate some degree of spending control/allowance to employees, so I can set up a new developer service, up to some limit, without having to wait until I’m in the same physical room as the company card.
To add on to this topic - a friend and I were discussing how great it would be to share an account with a partner to keep better track of shared expenditures. It may be simpler than what’s described for the parent-child scenario, but it would certainly make my life a lot easier!
Or, let’s say 3 roommates want to more easily split utility bills or shared resources like laundry detergent. Well, a single account can act as a common money pot. And with the transactions being to transparent, there’s no hiding or worrying about someone looting a few pounds here and there.
How about you talk to your children, or your partner, or your flatmates? I mean, technology is great, but human communication got us through so many centuries
A solution for the “real-time authorization” problem would be to decline transactions first and send a push notification to the phone - if the notification is approved then one future payment from the same merchant for the same amount will be approved. This works around the very quick response time required by MasterCard.
I’m have no reason to doubt that it would work technically but it would be almost unusable in the real world. I certainly wouldn’t want to inflict that sort of embarrassment on any of my family.
I mean, technology is great, but human communication got us through so many centuries