November 15, 2021
What is ‘MRS’ and how enriched transactions benefit modern banking experiences.
What does ‘Merchant Reconciliation System’ (MRS) mean?
According to American dictionary publisher Merriam Webster, the word “reconcile” means “to restore to friendship or harmony”. Taking this last word as a reference, we say that the Merchant Reconciliation System brings “harmony” to banking transactions and the overall user experience by making messy transaction data much easier to understand.
The main goal of our solution is to provide a better consumer banking experience. Customers often find it difficult to manage their savings or understand their expenses, due to a lack of trust or clarity from their bank. This results in many customer queries to the bank’s support center, at significant cost. Many of these problems could be solved if the user had access to better information about their transactions, and this is where transaction enrichment comes into play.
What is MRS?
MRS is an API which ingests messy transaction data and enriches it by providing the clean merchant name, logo, category, verified location, website, contact information and even merchant ratings, reviews and price level.
Our solution is also backed by the power of Google in order to provide users with the fantastic user experience they come to expect from modern banking platforms. MRS uses Google APIs, one of which being Google Places, to help retrieve location information and is also hosted on the Google Cloud Platform, which makes MRS a scalable and secure solution for banks.
How does MRS work?
MRS currently handles several hundreds of millions of global transactions from leading digital and traditional banks in the United Kingdom, across Europe and Southeast Asia. Recently our solution reached a significant milestone in processing 6,000 transactions per second with no impact on service speed.
We have generated and continue to maintain our own proprietary database of merchants, which is the result of extensive work undertaken by the Snowdrop team. This means that it is partially a manual, hands-on process as well as an automated one, as the human element of the process is there to ensure high accuracy standards are maintained. This database is integral for MRS to ‘match’ the messy transaction message to the appropriate merchant while enabling our clients more functionality with the data retrieved.
MRS is tailored to the needs of each of our clients, which enables us to consistently provide a best in class transaction enrichment solution which is easily integrated.
Benefits of Enriched Transactions
There are a range of benefits to implementing the MRS system, from an improved customer experience, significant savings in customer service costs to helping financial institutions to get closer to their customers and improve retention rates.
Users are offered a clear and clean experience, which improves their perception of their bank, as unclear data can cause mistrust and anxiety. By removing this uncertainty, we help banks better service their customers and in turn increase loyalty.
A great example of how a better user experience can have a major impact can be seen with one of our clients, Rebellion Pay, who have seen an improvement in both user investment and administrative cost reduction. “While our user acquisition stabilized over the pandemic, incoming funds have increased fivefold.”, says Gin Gindre, COO at Rebellion, “Since the implementation, the company has observed a 20% decrease in the number of customer service calls”.
This cost reduction has also been experienced by Dozens, a digital bank in the United Kingdom, which saw support costs driven down by 90%.
An appealing and user-friendly experience has a great ability to attract customers to the service. Another client of ours, Hugo, saw their mobile app ratings reach an incredible 4.5/5 just four months after launching with our MRS enrichment API. “The user experience is incredibly important to us and it is essential in building that personalized relationship with each and every Hugo Hero”, Braham Djidjelli, CoFounder & CPO at Hugo recently commented.
New clients can implement MRS at the outset of their product development, baking this enrichment capability into the core of their product.
Want to know more?
Snowdrop Solutions currently works with leading digital and traditional banks in Europe, the UK and Asia Pacific. Snowdrop is a location and data intelligence company that has been a Google Trusted Partner since 2013 and Visa Europe since 2020. MRS brings together our deep understanding of the Google Maps APIs, a proprietary database and a second to none matching algorithm. We offer superior match rates and accuracy to any of our competitors and a unique customer centric approach that, other than transaction enrichment, provides cost savings and churn reduction to our clients, over and over.
If you want to know more about our product, you can access more information on our dedicated MRS page or by contacting us. A member of the team will respond to your request promptly.