When Data Drags Consumers Down

Imagine being at the checkout of your favorite doughnut shop and the cashier mistakenly rings up your $2.20 order as $220 and proceeds to swipe your card.

That’s a lot of sprinkles that you really didn’t want.

It may sound a bit like a one-off occurrence, but when a similar situation happened to Mick Oppy, VP of Financial Institution Products at Vantiv, he was able to laugh off the situation rather than panic because of one simple factor.

Control.

Vantiv’s MobiMoney mobile app, a white-labeled solution designed for financial institutions, provides consumers with just that – delivering the control to truly manage prepaid, credit and debit cards in the palm of a cardholder’s hand.

MobiMoney empowers cardholders with a unique opportunity to control and manage their financial circumstances right from their mobile device. This includes turning their card off or on, receiving instant alerts on their device, or even limiting card usage based on location, merchant preferences, transaction type and threshold amounts.

“The big thing for us was that it seemed like you could do a lot to get information, but you couldn’t do a lot of action,” Oppy explained.

When consumers go to download a mobile app it’s because they want to be able to do something, which is why the idea of taking action through the MobiMoney concept resonated with Vantiv, he added.

Oppy said another memorable real-life scenario of the empowerment MobiMoney can provide is one instance where a user saw an eBay transaction come through but knew that it wasn’t her purchase.

Because it looked like a typical transaction the fraud controls didn’t pick it up, but the consumer was able to go in and turn her card off and in 10 minutes four additional transactions were attempted and blocked by Vantiv.

“From the cardholder perspective, we’ve earned her loyalty for life because she was empowered to control,” Oppy noted.

Not only that, he added, but from MobiMoney was also able to save the financial institution 80 percent on a chargeback scenario or a dispute scenario because four of those transactions didn’t even hit beyond the decline.

In these types of situations where a cardholder spots purchases that aren’t theirs, it’s easy for the feeling of helplessness to set in. Then they’re left to struggle with trying to get the card network or financial institution on the phone to address the situation, which typically can never happen fast enough.

Instead MobiMoney doesn’t just alert customers, its allows them to proactively take an action that can save them from the headache and frustration of fraudulent transactions.

Oppy noted that the most popular functions among cardholders are the on/off capability and setting purchasing thresholds, with the ability to turn off online purchases for a card coming in at a close third.

Minding The Mobile Ecosystem Gaps

While there are offerings in the market that provide variants of the consumer empowerment MobiMoney delivers, Oppy said Vantiv’s vantage point as an issuer processor provides it with a unique place to really inform the consumer and allow them to control everything.

In other solutions, the alerts may take place too late or they may be impacted by other dependencies such as only being able to handle certain types of transactions or dependencies.

MobiMoney sits as the gateway in and out of Vantiv’s processing, which Oppy explained enables users to be able to know what’s happening before the decline.

An alert can come through that fast.

For Vantiv, the biggest challenge thus far in pushing the MobiMoney solution through the ecosystem goes back to the concept of a financial institution having a single mobile app.

According to Oppy, the idea of having everything in an FI’s mobile app poses difficulty because mobile banking apps are built around a consumer’s checking and savings accounts, rather than being particularly card-centric.

Proving an incentive to download an app based on the service of feature provided, especially if the message is “protect yourself, protect your card,” may be enough to sway consumers to utilize it.

Oppy emphasized two features that he said make MobiMoney unique: It captures 100 percent of the transactions a consumer makes on their debit cards and the apps can be customized with FI branding.

Taking Control To The Next Level

Through its partnership with OnDot Systems, Oppy said Vantiv sees the app as a platform for further innovation and a chance to utilize the consumer control offered in a variety of other use cases.

The continuation of this innovation may lend itself to more self-service opportunities.

By taking the concept of control, Oppy said other contact strategies or interactions that consumers find frustrating can be optimized to take place securely via the mobile app.

From resetting a PIN to creating a PIN, reporting a card lost/stolen or even notifying a bank about travel exclusions, the mobile device presents a unique vehicle for these types of communications to take place in a more convenient way.

For cardholders using Apple Pay, the MobiMoney app enables the ability to turn off the provision or use of NFC with a card, meaning it can prevent someone from adding and using a card fraudulently on their mobile device.

“Now that we have the security play, the next logical initiative with what’s going on in the marketplace is loyalty and rewards,” Oppy said.

Empowerment, coupled with real-time alerting and messaging, creates the ability for consumers to take proactive steps and have a constant feedback loop when it comes to rewards and loyalty.

Oppy explained that the long-term goal of MobiMoney is centered on the concept of being “top of” — not just “top of” mind when it comes to mobile wallets, but top of mind when a cardholder seeks to manage and monitor their financial lives.

“With all the mobile wallets and fragmentation, we think that doing pre and post communication is how we make our cards ‘top of,’” he explained. “We see MobiMoney as a way to do that.”

No matter which payment method a cardholder uses – swiping, tap-and-go or via mobile – Oppy said the most important thing is that the financial institution is able to be there before and after.

“It complements any fraud and security strategy that a bank has in place and makes it very real for the user. They feel secure,” he emphasized.