It’s your card, so take control

MANILA, Philippines - It’s a feature that parents — or control freaks — who have issued supplementary credit or debit cards to their spouses or children and other family members will surely love. MasterCard’s inControl Family Solutions is an innovative service that lets cardholders track, limit and manage spending, and monitor budget allocation via a mobile app that users can access and make changes in real time anytime, anywhere. 

MasterCard provides the platform and hosts it for the banks. “MasterCard does the heavy lifting and work for the bank is minimal to none. They can be up and running in two to three months,” says Sandeep Malhotra, head of emerging payments platforms for Asia Pacific, Africa and the Middle East for MasterCard Worldwide.

A payments experts with successful product and business development track records worldwide, Malhotra was in Manila last month to give a talk to bank executives about inControl. 

The phone app is so easy to use — just log in and you get to see all the credit or debit cards you’ve registered and then begin setting your own controls for your spend on dining, shopping, groceries, gas consumption and even ATM transactions.

“You can get alerts or block a high amount of spend. If you’re a parent, and you’ve given your kids supplementary cards, you can manage how they spend it — you can put limits, say, P5,000, only on gas, or only in certain locations, or only on merchant categories like restaurants and bookstores but they cannot use it in a liquor store. There is a merchant category that comes with every transaction so they can identify what kind of store it is. You can block it by geography, by merchant category, and by time of day if you don’t want your kids to use their supplementary cards after, say, 9 p.m.”

 â€œLet’s say a card given to a son registers an attempted card use for a purchase that’s more than his allocated P20,000 budget. The parent will be immediately informed, via text or e-mail, to authorize the transaction. He can approve or disapprove it in realtime,” adds Poch Villa-Real, MasterCard Philippines country manager.

For parents who want to make sure their kid is focused on school-related activities, spending may be limited to purchases of books and school supplies, not in coffee shops and certainly not in bars, under the service’s Merchant Control.

The categories may be combined with day and time controls, which also filter out many possible misspending opportunities like transactions beyond midnight. 

“inControl is about having peace of mind that every centavo of money hard-earned will be well-spent,” says Villa-Real, adding, “It’s also about every family member also learning to manage and value the money they have that is based on the household budget.”

It works just as well for online transactions — you let them use it on Amazon but not Netflix or department stores and adult suites.

“That’s the whole intent — to manage your and their spending,” Malhotra says. 

The inControl app is also very useful for corporate cards because companies can now monitor spending in real time and block personal expenses.

And it can be done for the entire household  as well. Think of the reward points that you can accumulate if you didn’t have to give cash to your driver for gas or to the maid to do the groceries.  You can issue them supplementary cards that will work only in gas stations and supermarkets, and you can be rest assured that Manong and Inday will not use it on their dates. 

Whatever kind of consumers a bank has, you bet MasterCard and the banks have tons of data about their spending. For instance, there are cardholders who travel abroad frequently and then there are those that don’t — or if they do travel it’s within the country. For the latter group, the geography feature is especially useful if they are afraid of their cards getting stolen or skimmed. They can simply turn on the feature that allows the card to be used only in the Philippines.

“What if you’ve blocked international transactions but you are going to Bali for the weekend?” Malhotra says. “There is the geography control. You can open it up just for Bali—and only for ATM and no department stores or other merchants. Before, you had to call your bank and it takes them 24 hours before you can use it, but now the system is in real time. Instead of a consumer calling the issuer, you are empowered through the mobile application to control your card. Instantly. In real time. So you do an ATM transaction and then you lock it after. We’ve given the control from the banks to consumers. For the bank, it’s great because fraud is avoided and you don’t have to provide customer service for that.”

And, best of all, for the consumer, it’s empowerment and peace of mind.