Snowdrop Solutions Ltd. has teamed up with digital payments giant Visa in order to offer innovative location-enriched services to banking institutions and other financial services providers based in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. Through the partnership, both companies aim to allow millions of consumers to better understand where they’re spending their money.
Visa and Snowdrop will work cooperatively to distribute Snowdrop’s technologies and services to the payment giant’s existing banking clients. This should help with meeting the growing demand for new customer-centric banking services across the APAC region.
Many consumers get confused when they review their debit or credit card transactions. On many occasions, customers might not easily recognize the name of the merchant, or they can’t recall where they may have made the purchase.
Snowdrop’s Merchant Reconciliation System (MRS) and the Google Maps Platform allows banks to provide clear merchant names and display on a map with a company logo so that customers can easily check when and where the transaction took place (or if it didn’t take place).
Ken Hart, CEO and Founder of London-headquartered Snowdrop Solutions, remarked:
“We [aim to] turn confusion into clarity. And that builds consumer confidence.”
Hart also mentioned that the combination of Google Maps Platform, Snowdrop and Visa’s industry expertise and reach should help with accelerating the adoption of various other location-enriched banking services like reward programs, onboarding and fraud-detection throughout the Asia Pacific region.
Adeline Kim, Head of Data Solutions, APAC, Visa, stated:
“People in Asia Pacific use digital payments instead of cash for an increasing range of everyday purchases. That can add up into a long list of transactions on their bank statement that’s frustrating to review and leaves people wondering where they spent what. Using data to provide more details about each transaction removes that guessing game. Snowdrop is making it easier for people to track where they’re spending, which fits with Visa’s goal to make money movement a more secure, convenient experience.”
The new services may be deployed quickly as standard APIs, which means that a banking institution can easily install and introduce these services within a few weeks. MRS uses information in a payment processing message and doesn’t require banks to keep track of the location of the customer’s mobile phone.
In Europe, Snowdrop’s MRS has reportedly managed to reduce call centre and other operational costs for banking service providers, while improving customer loyalty scores.