What your bank statement will not tell you
Merchant descriptors are written by the acquirer, not the brand. That is why a service you know appears under a name you have never seen.
7 min read
A statement line is not the merchant's name. It is a string an acquiring bank wrote, often years ago, sometimes in another country, and it changes without anybody telling you.
Four things that go wrong
The name is not the brand
A legal entity, an acquirer's abbreviation, a city that is just where the processor is registered.
The name changes mid-history
Switch processor and the same subscription splits into two apparently unrelated series.
One charge is several products
An app-store line is a total, not a subscription.
The amount moves
Currency conversion, VAT changes and metered add-ons all turn a fixed subscription into a variable one.
What follows from that
Matching by name alone is unreliable; matching by amount, day-of-month and non-overlapping history is what actually works. That is roughly what we do, and it is why a renamed merchant stays one subscription instead of becoming two.
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