Something very close to this is done with fleet cards (cards given by long-haul trucking companies to their drivers to pay for gas and other expenses). At the high-end, these cards capture a great deal of data, comparable to a receipt. (Not exactly equivalent—it’s more detailed then a typical receipt for some data fields, but doesn’t include everything that can be put on a receipt). It’s expensive to implement and maintain these sorts of data capture systems, since a receipt is very flexible about the data it can contain. As a result, more broad implementation doesn’t make financial sense. The fraud gains are minimal. It’s worth doing in the fleet card segment because it helps with a) expense tracking, b) enforcing agreements between the large trucking companies and the chain gas stations regarding fuel discounts, and c) optimizing the choice of gas station (trading off the route efficiency against lower fuel prices). When I last consulted in the industry, this kind of data capture wasn’t even a close to being profitable for general-purpose credit cards. (It’s been ~5 years so my knowledge may be a bit out of date.) If you scaled back the requirements, it might be feasible.
I just tried reading some about fleet cards, and found this exxon faq and this sales page. It sounds like the number of gallons gets sent automatically, and you can set up the card to prompt for an odometer reading to be sent too. This is neat, though very fuel-specific.
When you say “at the high-end, these cards capture a great deal of data, comparable to a receipt”, what are you thinking of?
The fraud gains are minimal.
Why do you say that? I would expect comparing what was being purchased to a model from this user’s history and a model of fraudulent transactions would be very helpful!
Something very close to this is done with fleet cards (cards given by long-haul trucking companies to their drivers to pay for gas and other expenses). At the high-end, these cards capture a great deal of data, comparable to a receipt. (Not exactly equivalent—it’s more detailed then a typical receipt for some data fields, but doesn’t include everything that can be put on a receipt). It’s expensive to implement and maintain these sorts of data capture systems, since a receipt is very flexible about the data it can contain. As a result, more broad implementation doesn’t make financial sense. The fraud gains are minimal. It’s worth doing in the fleet card segment because it helps with a) expense tracking, b) enforcing agreements between the large trucking companies and the chain gas stations regarding fuel discounts, and c) optimizing the choice of gas station (trading off the route efficiency against lower fuel prices). When I last consulted in the industry, this kind of data capture wasn’t even a close to being profitable for general-purpose credit cards. (It’s been ~5 years so my knowledge may be a bit out of date.) If you scaled back the requirements, it might be feasible.
I just tried reading some about fleet cards, and found this exxon faq and this sales page. It sounds like the number of gallons gets sent automatically, and you can set up the card to prompt for an odometer reading to be sent too. This is neat, though very fuel-specific.
When you say “at the high-end, these cards capture a great deal of data, comparable to a receipt”, what are you thinking of?
Why do you say that? I would expect comparing what was being purchased to a model from this user’s history and a model of fraudulent transactions would be very helpful!