The charge your customer didn't recognize: why your statement name still matters

A customer opens her banking app on a Sunday night. There’s a $1,850 charge from a name she has never seen, with a city that isn’t hers. She doesn’t call you, because she doesn’t know it was you. She taps “dispute.”

It was the anniversary bracelet she bought from you three weeks ago.

The banks are working on it

On September 28, FIS, which runs debit card processing for banks and other card issuers, said it is adding cleaner merchant details to debit transactions on its platform. It’s working with a data company called Spade to swap raw transaction text for a recognizable merchant name and location. FIS says the change is designed to reduce unnecessary disputes, and it is available now to the banks and other issuers that run their debit cards through FIS.

That’s good news. It also has limits:

• It’s debit only. The announcement covers debit cards, not credit cards.
• It’s one processor’s banks. Your customer’s card may come from a bank that doesn’t use it.
• It’s a match, not your words. The cleaner name comes from matching your charge against Spade’s merchant database. What your account sends is still where that match starts.

The part you control

Every card sale carries a short line of text from your account, called the merchant name or descriptor. It’s what shows up on the statement before any bank tidies it up. Sometimes it’s the legal name of the company that owns the store, or a holding company name, and nobody at your counter has ever said it out loud.

We’ve written about how an unrecognized charge turns into a dispute, and what to do when the person disputing is your own customer. The fix is the same in both: make the charge look like you.

Ask whoever runs your payments three things:

1. 01What does my descriptor say today? Get the exact text, not a description of it.
2. 02Is it the name on my sign? The name a customer would search for, not the one on your tax return.
3. 03Do my online and in-store sales read the same? If your website sells under a different name, that’s the charge customers are least likely to place.

If the answer to the first question takes more than a day, that tells you something about your setup too.

Why it’s worth ten minutes

A dispute can cost you the sale, the time to answer it, and the merchandise. Checking your descriptor costs a phone call. Banks cleaning up debit charges will help some of your customers recognize you. A descriptor that says your store’s name helps on every card, debit or credit.

If you want to know what your customers see on their statements today, talk to an expert at 770-766-1060.