This is more of a hypothetical than a practical suggestion at this point, but I’m interested in how an arrangement might work.
As a merchant, we’re interested in whether we could actively push information about transaction to Mondo on our users’ behalf, for users who have paid with a Mondo card. It seems that this would be useful for tying transactions back to what they were for, what happened, etc. and having legal docs on hand in the event of a problem down the line.
For example, we (Cuvva) could generate a line on a map of where you drove when you were insured by us, we could include the policy certificate & documentation, as well as a deep link into our app/website to start a support session with us if you had problems. We’d probably want to provide these as HTML or PDFs.
I’d be interested to discuss how this might be possible - without having our users pay via some kind of proprietary “Mondo Pay” SDK, and how you might envisage this working in the future. Perhaps it could work in a way which is independent of the company managing the card - so any bank could pull the related information from any merchant supporting the system.
This would be awesome! Some of this you could definitely do now with our API: https://getmondo.co.uk/docs/ - adding a map to the transaction for example, and hopefully in the relatively near future most of this should be possible using the API. You should definitely come to our next hackathon to get it started
The current API requires that the user provides us with access to their account right? We’d probably be looking for a more transparent solution where we could somehow validate that we are Cuvva, and therefore have control over all “Cuvva” transactions.
Also, we’d need a way of being able to uniquely identify transactions with absolutely no risk of vagueness or inaccuracy. Hence, it’s something which would probably need quite a bit of thought to be able to do in a real world situation.
I love the idea of a “take it or leave it” API for merchants that doesn’t require a complicated setup by the user.
I’ll find out which parts of the MasterCard message we get are sufficiently unique and can’t be forged. Perhaps we could even make setup and verification automatic for merchants. “Please initiate a 50p payment using statement descriptor {unique ID} on a developer’s mondo card to confirm that you are this merchant”
If it was in any way possible, it’d be great to add some kind of ID to the transactions from our end, but I think the only thing we can actually use is the descriptor - which after the company name, doesn’t have much space left.
I love the idea of using the authorization messages to do verifications
Maybe that would be the way. As part of Mondo on-boarding you as an integrated merchant, they provide you with a unique key (That identifies you as Cuvva) for you to use in your transaction descriptions. When you charge a clients account, you append your own internal transaction ID with the Mondo supplied key.
When Mondo receives the charge, it can show a message that would match a “traditional” merchant charge description (One confined by the message format) ie. ‘Cuvva insurance payment’. This way, push alerts etc. all work and if someone sees the transaction in their account, everything would look normal. However, via the API, Cuvva can now update the charge detail to include all the information they’d like to be associated with it.
Few problems with using the statement descriptor though:
they are not long enough to include a unique ID as well as our company name (Stripe max 15 chars)
we cannot differentiate Mondo cards - all we can see is “MasterCard Prepaid” (no access to the BIN/IIN), so:
the ID would appear on statements for customers from all banks - may look confusing
if other banks supported a similar system, the key would need to be the same for all of them
Ideally we’d be able to provide a full UUID as a separate piece of data which banks receive, but can ignore. I don’t know if anything like this might exist though (@jonas)?
You wouldn’t need your name as well as the unique ID. That’s the point of the mapping on Mondo’s side of your ID to a generic company name/description.
So when Mondo see a transaction description with CompanyID-TransactionID, they know that the default transaction narrative for your company ID is Cuvva - Insurance payment. This would show until you updated Mondo with the detail for the specific transaction ID via the API.
Getting a bit too specific here but Stripe can provide you with the IIN but this might be an on request thing. I know you’re also allowed to store the IIN so you’d know ongoing whether the card token you are charging is Mondo or not. Minor hiccup here might be that Mondo don’t have their own IIN yet but I presume that’s coming.
I can’t remember whether there’s another field in ISO 8583 that you could use but that would also depend on whether the acquirer will let you populate it.
Mondo’s IIN is 535420 as far as I know - or at least all their cards should be in that group.
The main issue is that we can’t be working on a per-bank basis. A small business like ours is not going to implement a system which can only be used by one bank. If it was generic and could be used by many, we would be pretty happy to though.
If we do get access to the IIN, then it would probably be feasible as we can switch the descriptor based on a whitelist of banks, but otherwise we can’t be removing our company name from all transactions.
That’s the one they are using but I think that belongs to Wirecard so the issue here is other Wirecard customers wouldn’t support this integration so they’d suffer from the problem you described previously of seeing descriptions that don’t necessarily make sense.
This is exactly right. The IIN is the way a merchant would need to manage this. The only way I could see it working for all is if the schemes supported it which I don’t think I’ve heard any mentions of them working towards but you never know I guess!
I like the idea of some kind of a generic public-ish record of ‘receipts’ for transactions which can be provided by merchants, and accessed by banks. They could contain rich media, links, data, etc.
The bank & the merchant would both need to be verified to be able to read/write the information - potentially via the method mentioned by Jonas.
I work for a small startup and we’d be interested in this functionality too. Our customers purchase customised printed products from us and we generate CGI renders of their purchases which we use in our app and in emails. It’d be cool if we could automatically push into Mondo (or Mondo could fetch details about the transaction from us).
One of the developers who came to our first hackathon (@Sam s brother actually) is working on a startup where they will push us the line item receipt data for retailers that opt in. So they’d be a sort of middleware between merchants and us.
Ive heard rumours that mastercard/visa would like to have the terminals send line-item-data with purchases as well, but a lot of retailers don’t want that kind of info getting out there as then the banks could work out exactly which products are doing well at particular vendors.
Interestingly, after contacting Stripe, they’ve told us that they are not able to provide BINs/IINs to us:
I’ve consulted with my colleagues on this and I’m afraid there isn’t a way to do this – we aren’t in the position to pass you BIN’s. I understand that this probably isn’t the answer you were hoping for, but our hands are tied in this situation.
I think this falls into this topic - less of a how i would pull it off, more of a cool ideas to have from the vendor:
• See the loyalty points earned from a transaction
• Having the full uber receipt that you would normally get in an email, so you can see trip, etc.
• Have detailed membership information from your gym / medical aid when you get your monthly bill. Can see this being great if you upgrade your service and then could compare your spend from before and after the change to see if it was worth it. and I’m sure there are tons of other great bits in that data playground
• The line item information from retailers being the best thing - then data would really be insightful
• Having access your profile with certain vendors - i.e with netflix you could be taken straight to your account page with them and pause the service, if you decided that spending was to much. Or even better, if it was a recurring expense you could put a freeze on it straight from the mondo app!
… i could probably go on for ages but thought I would share a glance of my excitement with this
