3) Categorization and Taxonomy
It’s easy to classify a business to restaurants. It takes more effort to categorize all the restaurants based on cuisine or style. After all, a high-end steakhouse is different than a family restaurant. ‘Shopping’ can describe many distinct purchases - a transaction at a men’s clothing store, a women’s clothing boutique or a home furnishings store. Specific categorizations make a difference.
Taxonomy can also reflect other attributes of a purchase. For example, identifying transactions as recurring subscription payments could allow a financial institution to know which of it’s cardholders use it’s product as their primary card and which customers are most sticky.
Financial institutions should demand that a merchant payment cleansing vendor deliver specific categorization into a robust taxonomy so the cleansed data can help the FI make strategic decisions.
For over a decade, Segmint’s taxonomy and categorization knowledge base has been curated by a team of advanced-degree library scientists. In a recent merchant cleansing bake-off, Segmint delivered 10x more categories as the next competitor with better speed and quality.