Just a few months after the implementation of a mandate that issuers must offer transaction alerts in the US, Mastercard are now mandating the same for the UK.
Issuers will need to have implemented the alerts for customers by 13th April 2018. The official announcement also contained the following details as to the information alerts will need to include at a minimum:
- Transaction amount
- Whether or not it is a cross-border transaction
- The specific transaction type (e.g. e-commerce, mail order) or channel (e.g. card-not-present), or both
It’s the first mandate regarding transaction alerts made in Europe, and it remains to be seen whether this is for the UK only, or whether Mastercard will also be rolling it out in other European countries simultaneously.
Mastercard suggest that their own Spend Alerts infrastructure is used for the transaction alerts, however they note that infrastructure that meets the requirements of offering the above information will be permissible (Vipera’s own CardControl [link to the control page] includes the Spend Alerts functionality as well as Spend Controls and our budgeting functionality. It also supports VISA alerts and controls).