Should Merchant Data be Open Data

In the way of a Wikipedia for merchant data, so all Fintech banks could contribute back to a open repository of information, and people contribute back to it individually as well (with obvious anti-vandalism), this could stop customers from having to re-enter merchant data again and again across different banks and mean that in the end, all banks have a better source of merchant information. This could potentially save customer services time too as it means less work and duplication for customer services too.

What do the community think of this idea?

5 Likes

I’d say yes considering the data was crowd-sourced in the first place.

4 Likes

I’d love this to happen, but there would need to be some infrastructure around it - maybe a not for profit company -rather than purely open data.

I mentioned this before, but a not for profit set up as a contemporary start-up (rather than “traditionally” like pay.uk) would be an even better idea:

I think it would need to wait for this you cease to be a differentiator and something commodotised first though. I wonder how important merchant data is to Monzo as a differentiator… :thinking:

1 Like

Well i would argue that Merchant data kind is already open source (kind of) - I know Mastercard has a merchant API. Its just very difficult(in my opinion) to use. if anything a spin out of Monzo that just did this would probably be quite profitable assuming other Fintechs use similar technology and legacy banks want a slice.

Here in Portugal we already have something like that. All merchants send data to the government for every transaction so that tax deductions are automatically applied. A lot of credit card companies already use that merchant database to attribute cashback benefits

2 Likes