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Increase adds real-time merchant data from Spade to card transactions
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Increase today announced an integration with Spade, which provides real-time merchant data for card transactions. Card transactions on Increase now include an enrichment record from Spade with the merchant’s name, legal name, logo, website, phone number, store location, and an industry category up to four levels deep.

With the integration, card transactions on Increase are matched in real time against Spade’s Merchant Graph, a proprietary, verified record of 99.9% of US and Canadian businesses. The Merchant Graph links store locations to the brand and owner behind them and is kept current as merchant IDs (MIDs) change, so a business is recognized across the different descriptors it appears under. It reaches the long tail of small, local, and newly opened businesses, identifies the merchant behind charges routed through payment processors such as Square, and flags delivery apps and marketplaces as third parties. Spade also assigns its own merchant categories, granular enough to separate a coffee shop from a fine-dining restaurant.

Increase delivers the result on the real-time card records its users already build against. The data is available during a real-time authorization decision and can be retrieved later for display. Spade returns data in under 40 milliseconds at over 99% accuracy. The enrichment field is optional by design, so an authorization never depends on it.

Card programs can use the data in three ways. Cardholders can recognize charges from a clean name and logo. A merchant’s phone number and address can resolve many “who charged me?” questions before they become disputes. Authorization and fraud rules can act on location and category directly, for example by measuring the distance between a cardholder’s home address and the store. The same record also gives card programs consistent merchant data to build analytics, AI features, and personalized cardholder experiences on.

“Vertical software platforms building card and banking programs on Increase want to delight their users, minimize fraud, and deeply understand spend behavior,” said Warren Brown, General Manager, Cards at Increase. “Spade’s enriched merchant data expands our already data-rich APIs in ways that support all of these goals.”

“Increase gives its users direct access to the card network through its API, and now Spade’s merchant data travels on that same authorization record,” said Oban MacTavish, CEO and co-founder of Spade. “A card program launching on Increase can show cardholders charges they recognize and make authorization decisions on the exact merchant and location from its very first transaction.”

Enriched merchant data is available to card programs on Increase today.

Banking products and services offered through Increase Bank, Member FDIC and Increase’s bank partners, each Member FDIC.

Banking products and services are offered by Increase Bank, Grasshopper Bank, N.A., First Internet Bank of Indiana, or Core Bank (each, a Member FDIC bank and a “Partner Bank”).

Technology services are provided by Increase Technologies, Inc., a non-bank.

Where applicable, Visa® cards are issued by the applicable Partner Bank pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc.

Eligible deposits held at a Partner Bank are insured by the FDIC up to the standard maximum deposit insurance amount. FDIC insurance protects against the failure of an insured bank only.