In this blog, you’ll learn more about our Merchant Payments Intelligence (MPI): CMSPI’s collective insights and data – with trillions of datapoints from across our optimization work – that we are using to support the entire merchant community.

Billions. Annually, CMSPI’s data platform ingests billions of transactions from our merchant clients. Connecting to the spectrum of acquirer and payments service provider report delivery methods – ranging from direct API connections to scanned PDFs for some of our more exotic markets – our data team anonymizes and aggregates the data by standardizing multiple fields to see the merchant story at a macro-level.

But the journey to standardize payments data, card payments data in particular, began over 40 years ago with a working draft study initiated to standardize the way acquirers and issuers communicate financial card transaction messages: ISO 8583.

Like a game of telephone – the classic party game where players whisper a secret message down a line ending with a distorted result – stretched over decades, payments data is passed through various stakeholders and standards. Progress is made by reflecting on the past: what’s worked, and what hasn’t. Standardization is needed when we consider the quantity of data being evaluated.

Let’s reflect on the good, the bad, and the inevitable of standardizing payments data and see what progress CMSPI is making to ensure a more productive payments ecosystem today.

The Good: Frameworks are Important

It could go without saying, but let’s state the obvious: frameworks are important. Frameworks provide order and structure and allow dispersed data to become useable at a greater scale. Governance, design, security, storage – these are all equally critical factors in data frameworks and all important to merchants when considering their sensitive payments data. 

Whether it’s aggregating our merchants’ data today, or a global standard for card payment transactions started in the 1980s, we can appreciate frameworks and the need for standardization across payments data. CMSPI has created structure for billions of transactions amounting to trillions of dollars in card transaction value by constructing our Data Fabric, the glue holding together our normalization processes across all data. This Data Fabric has allowed us to aggregate data across the industry resulting in our Merchant Payments Intelligence (MPI) including over 60,000 BINs. This has provided our team with a better understanding of routing opportunities across more than 7,000 unique issuers and 15+ unique card networks.

The Bad: Inflexibility of a Standard

The purpose of a standard is to create consistency and alignment across stakeholders. However, even the best of standards can create challenges in practice. The payments industry is constantly changing; new network fees and programs, ongoing regulation and litigation battles, and updated technology can all demand new data to optimize payment strategies. The complexity of payments data, card payments in particular, demand a standard for parties involved to communicate productively. A consequence of standardizing such complex data is the risk of oversimplifying important edge cases: standards can be inflexible, not allowing for needed revisions in a timely manner. Without implementation of updates, standards set decades ago will miss important nuances of the card market today.

Our approach to normalizing payments data is not immune to this. A dedicated team focused entirely on interpreting, defining, and predicting changes in payments telemetry and how it’s labelled, combined with CMSPI’s strong relationships with merchants and industry partners, allow constant updates on data validation and normalization, which is reflected in the consistency of our MPI. An update doesn’t stay siloed to one merchant; we are able to apply the revision promptly and calculate any impact on the merchant community in only a matter of days.

The Inevitable: Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen

The need for a standard assumes there are multiple parties utilizing the same data. In payments there are many stakeholders – networks, issuers, acquirers, merchants, third-party service providers, etc. With each offering different services, the data needed for operations and the output created for reporting can vary. And while the ISO 8583 transaction message provides a base structure for processing card payment transactions, this is not a standard shared across all players in the industry – even individual networks have their own requirements that only loosely follow the guidelines set by ISO. This has culminated in multiple reports and datasets being created and ultimately bringing about confusion and disharmony.

By establishing our own comprehensive “CMSPI Dictionary” of payments terms and definitions utilized by the MPI, we’re able to take any supplier report and provide efficient, accurate, and actionable insights into optimization opportunities.

Solution: Merchant Payments Intelligence (MPI)

Attempts to standardize data in the past have focused on card transaction messages for acquirers and issuers. While important for consistency across the global payments’ ecosystem, merchants are often left with fragmented reporting and datasets to navigate. For years, our team at CMSPI has been ingesting the vast array of data merchants receive – over 400 different schema structures – to optimize their payments strategy with a vision of creating a merchant-centered aggregated dataset to tell the merchants’ story more effectively, resulting in our Merchant Payments Intelligence (MPI) today. The MPI has allowed us to individually improve merchants’ payments performance, as well as advocating for a more fair and competitive landscape for the merchant community as a whole.