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> Discover card has a section in your UI that tries to automatically break down your spending by store type All merchants that accept credit cards are placed i

> Discover card has a section in your UI that tries to automatically break down your spending by store type All merchants that accept credit cards are placed in a category by the card companies, and every credit or debit card purchase therefore gets this category attached to it. Some places surfaces this information to you, in various ways. I have Chase, and they have a pretty shitty UI for this, but there's something there at least. So it's not unique to Discover, and it's not them "guessing" or trying, it's based on fixed merchant categories.

r00fus 9y ago
It's even codified and part of ISO standards [1]. It's not a conspiracy, it's simply Discovercard putting a UI around data that's already being collected. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_category_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_category_code
fleminra 9y ago
> Some places surfaces this information to you, in various ways. Citibank includes this code in the "SID" element in OFX generated by their "OFX Direct" service (i.e. https://www.accountonline.com/cards/svc/CitiOfxManager.do https://www.accountonline.com/cards/svc/CitiOfxManager.do). I haven't seen it in the OFX from any other financial institution though. The codes are cataloged here: https://github.com/greggles/mcc-codes https://github.com/greggles/mcc-codes