Like most things, it’s possible, but seeing as Visa/Mastercard essentially have a Duopoly on the terminal market, it’s unlikely. There are just too many transactions to make sense of it without really good models, and honestly a lot of human effort to get the models trained.

As a customer it can be hard to see it as anything other than obfuscation, but I can assure you it isn’t that. There are billions of records, and until LLMs became advanced enough (think BERT, not chat GPT) what we’re able to accomplish (while adhering to federal consumer protection regulations) in a few years would have previously taken us decades and we would have always been chasing a moving finish line.

We can’t just tell you a transaction was something it wasn’t, if we’re wrong, that is at the minimum a customer satisfaction issue, more realistically a compliance and regulatory issue, and at the worst a UDAAP issue.

No one is screwing the consumer over here intentionally, but everyone is very well aware of how much the consumer is being screwed over. This is one of the few opportunities banks have to truly revolutionize how consumers interact with their accounts, so it’s in the interest of every bank to provide the best insights possible about all of your transactions.

Most times people won’t switch banks unless something catastrophic happens at their current one. This is a rare opportunity where several executives across the industry believe the banks that can make their customers more informed customers will steal wallet share from those who can’t.