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Are You Ready for Cardholder Transaction Alerts?

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8 June 2016
Zilvinas Bareisis

Quite a few issuers around the world already offer transaction alerts to their cardholders. They find them a helpful tool to reduce fraud, reduce false positives (i.e. unnecessary card declines), and strenghten their engagement with customers.

However, in a few months, this will no longer be optional for issuers in the US. Effective October 14, 2016, Visa is mandating all the US issuers to offer their cardholders an option to enroll into transaction alerts. In other words, customers still have the opportunity to decide whether to use the alerts or not, but the issuers must make the option available to them. The mandate applies to consumer Visa credit, debit and reloadable prepaid cards; currently, commercial cards and non-reloadable prepaid cards are exempt. MasterCard has similar requirements - dual brand issuers also must comply by October 2016; MasterCard-only issuers have until April 21, 2017. Importantlly, unlike EMV deadline, which was a liability shift, these are real mandates which the issuers must comply with.

Alerts via email or SMS are the easiest but also the most basic option. In our view, issuers should look beyond the "compliance" requirements and take the opportunity to deploy notification, alert and control platforms that are integrated into their channels of customer engagement, such as mobile banking or payment apps. Advanced solutions in this space offer a range of alert delivery options, as well as ability for consumers to control their cards (e.g. turn off their use for certain transactions, such as e-commerce) and deliver other types of notifications, such as various offers.

Issuers must decide how they will be delivering the service. They can develop it in-house, deploy a third party solution or rely on their processors to offer the service on their behalf. The networks also offer their own solutions. In fact, in order to pursue any of the above options, the issuers had to notify Visa by April 29 this year that they wish to opt out of Visa-branded alerts service.

Visa itself offers a few alternatives and has just announced this weeka "Visa Digital Commerce App, an issuer-branded mobile commerce solution that enables financial institutions to offer their own mobile app to customers with valuable card management services." In addition to the card management features, including the alerts, the issuers can also build HCE-based contactless payments into their apps. While a number of large US issuers (e.g. Capital One, Wells Fargo) have either launched or announced their HCE-based wallets, Visa's offering should help increase adoption of cloud-based payments and issuer-branded apps with contactless payment functionality.

Of course, there are a number of other vendors offering card control platforms or tokenised cloud payments, as well as processors with their capabilities. As an issuer, you have to make sure your choice fits your broader payments strategy. Whatever the decision, you have to make sure you can offer your cardholders the option to receive alerts by October.

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