Merchant Data Corrections

An entertaining one… logo is fine, but the name is a mess!

Isn’t that down to the merchant? I see this often on all my accounts.

I thought this was how the retailer had their name with the bank. Could be wrong though

Yep, and someone from monzo has updated the logo without fixing the name…

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Do you know when we might start to hopefully see more updated forward? :eyes:

I understand that we’re now scheduling people on it, but the backlog is impressive (I haven’t looked at merchant data myself in months, so I don’t know just how big….)

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Glad to see its going to get ongoing attention.

It really does play down the professionalism and look and feel of the app when you have random strings as transaction names

Go take a look :eyes: Tell us how many are in the queue! :sweat_smile:

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Does people resubmitting cause extra work? Or does the first instance being fixed take out the repeats?

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Resubmitted creates extra work, unfortunately.

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But may increase the odds of it getting done (I agree, shouldn’t resubmit)

Random note but I’m really impressed with Chase’s merchant info considering it’s quite new.

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Could this be updated to Esso and bulked up with the other ESSO petrol stations I don’t know how it lost it’s enrichment.

They are more likely franchised so may not be possible to have them all under the same umbrella logo.

It would be useful if the app tracked correction requests. I’m sure I’ve put in multiple requests for the same thing simply because I’ve forgotten that I had previously submitted a request.

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This is a very valid point didn’t look at it like that but I’ll see what happens anyway just an update would be nice.

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Merchant data is probably very low on the list of priorities as it doesn’t impact the banking service in any way, solely just a picture

To the naked eye perhaps not.

But i wonder if people have contacted cops before because they didnt recognise a transaction due to poor merchant information? That would have an impact.

Look and feel of the app would also have an impact, unsure of how measurable but most people will expect their banking apps to not include incorrect data. Could that play a part in deterring older customers?

Basically trying to say whilst its not directly affecting it will still have an affect in some form.

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Absolutely!

Y’all know how passionate I am about the merchant data, for me it’s one of the core parts of the Monzo app and it was one of the features which originally set us apart from the rest of the competition. When you open the app it just feels better to be able to see enriched data, rather than a string of nonsense(?). I think it’s worth giving Chase a shoutout because although their merchant enrichment isn’t as strong as ours (in terms of logos, location etc) their actual mapping logic for small merchants which use payment processors like Square and IZettle is on point and so even the smallest of merchants in my local area have names that just make sense!

But it does have an impact on other things too, so Trends only works effectively if the merchant grouping is correct, as does things like being able to see how many transactions/values/averages at various merchants. We have, and have historically had, multiple groups for some merchants initially because of what appears to be human error and subsequently because the tooling doesn’t make it easy to merge large merchant groups.

Poor or inaccurate merchant enrichment does have a real cost to the business too, people have and do get in touch because they believe that their transactions are fraud when in fact the error is on our side. That costs us money in terms of frontline time, disputes time, complaint redress etc. Of course on the flip side is when somebody makes a mistake and an entire merchant group changes name (remember the co-op saga anybody?!) and we’ve been trying to address this to avoid this happening again.

There has been some work behind the scenes to improve some of our internal merchant tooling and a bit of a project to try and improve the way we process data, automatically, so now we have better logic for merchants like NowTV and eBay.

Now that work has taken place, I understand that we’re starting to have delivered training and schedule people on this (I’ve just checked and the number of people scheduled on it this hour runs into double figures :woo:). The backlog is real though, but it is coming down!

Anyway, I hope that provides a little insight and remember I feel your pain with the merchant enrichment! I’ll keep banging the drum as loud and often as I can (& I always share a link to this thread whenever I do so, because it shows I’m not in isolation!)

I’m not particularly close to merchant feedback anymore from a work point of view because pretty much all of my time is now spend in financial crime but it’s now a hobby :rofl:

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Thanks for the update, Dan. This sort of thing is the Community at its best. :muscle:

This would be an excellent topic for an AMA (or blog post) @AlanDoe

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