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A comment on Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines. Parent comment

Re:Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines by henrikschroder on Friday April 20, 2018 @05:07PM (#16888441)
> Discover card has a section in your UI that tries to automatically break down your spending by store type

All merchants that accept credit cards are placed in a category by the card companies, and every credit or debit card purchase therefore gets this category attached to it. Some places surfaces this information to you, in various ways. I have Chase, and they have a pretty shitty UI for this, but there's something there at least.

So it's not unique to Discover, and it's not them "guessing" or trying, it's based on fixed merchant categories.

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Re:Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines by r00fus on Friday April 20, 2018 @06:46PM (#16888934)
It's even codified and part of ISO standards [1]. It's not a conspiracy, it's simply Discovercard putting a UI around data that's already being collected.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_category_code

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Re:Wells Fargo Hit with $1B in Fines by fleminra on Saturday April 21, 2018 @12:58AM (#16890054)
> Some places surfaces this information to you, in various ways.

Citibank includes this code in the "SID" element in OFX generated by their "OFX Direct" service (i.e. https://www.accountonline.com/cards/svc/CitiOfxManager.do). I haven't seen it in the OFX from any other financial institution though. The codes are cataloged here: https://github.com/greggles/mcc-codes

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