Card Activity Optics

Introducing the latest addition to our suite of Optics tools, joining Phone Optics and It’s Me 247 Optics in providing powerful data about your members’ activity with their ATM, debit and credit cards. Beyond the transactions that hit member accounts, Optics let you see the activity that happens before and around the transaction, including what didn’t hit the member’s account at all.

Card Activity Optics will help your plastics specialists and data analysts act on insights from member card traffic. It is part of a suite of Optics data sets designed to collect and act on new types of non-transactional data. Watch for more news on the Optics suite coming during 2021 from the Asterisk Intelligence team.

Projects In the Queue Now

This is more than just a single project, and we expect this will launch many more projects and ideas down the road. Here’s a list of what’s cooking right now:

Expanding transaction tables to include new EFT-related data

Our intent here is to incorporate several new data elements into the TRANSx and HTRANSx database tables, both for analysis purposes and also to be used in various other projects as described below, such as analysis dashboards and cash-back/activity rebate programs. After this expansion, transaction records will now also record the following data elements, pulled from the incoming ISO data:

Merchant category code (MCC)
Card present indicator
Last 4 digits of card #
ISO sequence # (to tie the transaction back to the data in the new Card Activity Optics tables)
PINless PIN indicator
Smart ATM cash-only deposit indicator
Recurring debit card transaction indicator

This new data will be displayed on the additional transaction details screens accessed via Transaction Inquiry in CU*BASE.

Status as of September 2020: Project #53033, which expands the TRANSx and HTRANSx tables, is currently in development. Project #53260, which populates data into these new fields from incoming EFT traffic, is waiting for available programming resources.

Refining ISO data and moving it to where a CU analysts can use it

Have you ever wondered how many times members are denied for a debit card purchase each month? If members are using cards online more often than swiping them at a store? How many out-of-network ATM fees your members are paying? This data, and much more, is included in the millions of back-and-forth records that comprise our daily EFT activity, but until, this data was not readily available to end users, especially aggregated to encompass all of a credit union’s plastics traffic.

This project takes data from the mammoth, complex tables which we refer to as “the ISO files” and segregates it into new tables stored at the credit union level in the FILExx library. ISO files currently contain data for all EFT transactions for all online credit unions, and are stored in a central library not accessible to CU data analysts, in order for it to be accessible for EFT traffic coming in from the vendors.

With this project, a refined set of that data will copied from the master files at the end of each day and stored in each credit union’s FILExx library, for use by data analysts (yours and ours!), as well as for day-to-day troubleshooting by support teams, such as the SettleMINT EFT team.

More importantly, we are refining and reorganizing the data to make the data easier for analysts to interpret and use, including adding definitions and descriptions to previously cryptic vendor codes and indicators. While the resulting data is still very complex (and still mammoth!), a new data dictionary will be available to help users make sense of everything.

Given the volume of data, online retention will likely be relatively short (still to be determined), but we will be including this data in our suite of data warehouse offerings, brought to you by the Asterisk Intelligence Team. Learn more about data warehouse options in the AI store.

Status as of September 2020: Project #53312 is currently in QC and will be implemented during November 2020. We will be rolling out the process slowly for a few CUs at a time to allow us to monitor system performance for this very data-intensive daily process.

New configuration for credit unions to define MCC groups

This project will allow credit unions to define their own groups of merchant category codes, for use in various analysis dashboards as well as in other enhancements planned for cash-back/rebate programs, promotional rates, and more. Unlimited groups can be configured, and the same MCC can be included in multiple groups, to maximize the number and variety of promotional campaigns you can set up across your EFT products.

Status as of September 2020: Project #52070 is currently in development.

Enhancements to card rebate/cash back programs

These projects will enhance both the Debit Card Activity Rebate program (Tool #1320) as well as the Credit Card Cash Back program (Tool #1550) to allow credit unions to define special rates based on the merchant category code (MCC) on the incoming transaction. For example, you might want to give cash-back rewards of 2% on gas purchases, and 1% on everything else. Using the configuration in project #52070 (described above), you’ll be able to create a separate MCC Group that contains the gas MCC code(s) you desire, then set a separate rate for that group, with another rate (or even 0%) for all other transactions.