NEW YORK, NY — (Marketwired) — 07/25/13 — , the leading personal finance protection company, today delivered a landmark industry report revealing that American cardholders paid $14.3 billion in deceptive Grey Charges in 2012. The report also explores the impact on US card issuers, totaling their losses at $562 million.
BillGuard retained , a leading research and advisory firm with expertise in financial services, to conduct the study to examine the grey charge problem among US debit and credit cardholders and the service cost impact on card issuers.
The report reveals 11 types of deceptive and unwanted credit and debit card charges known as “grey charges,” that occur as a result of misleading sales and billing practices that are not properly disclosed to consumers. At 115 million transactions and $6 billion in charges — the most prominent type of grey charge is “free-to-paid.” An example is when a consumer receives a good or service for a free trial period and then is automatically charged a fee if they do not cancel or return the good or service within a given timeframe. Aite Group-s analysis shows that it is in the issuers- best interest — economically and ethically — to help cardholders monitor and avoid grey charges.
“Over the past two years we-ve amassed a powerful dataset of consumer knowledge on nearly a billion credit and debit card transactions,” said Yaron Samid, founder and CEO of BillGuard. “This data has quantified what most of us intuitively know to be true; merchants profit greatly, at the expense of cardholders, when we don-t check our bills. Capitalism drives revenue optimizations and churn reduction techniques, but improper disclosure of sales and billing terms crosses a red line of ethics. Now that anyone with a smartphone can charge your credit cards, the problem has become an epidemic. Today we-re taking important steps to fight back by educating consumers and financial service providers, and equipping cardholders with a breakthrough tool for finding and resolving grey charges: the new BillGuard iPhone app.”
The free app intelligently prioritizes noteworthy, recent and recurring charges across all of a cardholder-s credit and debit cards. “It-s like a Smart Inbox for your money,” said Samid. “The app uses crowdsourced analytics from BillGuard-s national Transaction Intelligence Network to help users quickly spot and recognize charges deemed questionable by other cardholders on their cards. As users archive verified charges and trusted merchants with a single finger-swipe, BillGuard gets smarter, customizing their priority list with the charges they want to review. To handle billing inquiries and disputes BillGuard completely bypasses the costly and inefficient chargeback networks to connect cardholders directly to merchants for free, expedited resolution. It-s a classic win-win-win for consumers, merchants and banks.”
“Monitoring — and preventing — grey charges would be beneficial to both consumers and banks,” said Ron Shevlin, Senior Analyst at research and advisory firm Aite Group. “By using technology and tools like BillGuard, cardholders stand to save up to US$7 billion in charges, and card issuers could reduce customer service costs by hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Click to download the complete report, or for a quick overview of the findings and BillGuard-s solution an infographic can be viewed .
Cardholders can download the iPhone app or signup for the web app at .
BillGuard is the Transaction Intelligence Network enabling trusted commerce via credit cards, debit cards and digital wallets, by harnessing the inputs of millions of consumers and merchants and financial service providers. This crowdsourced knowledge empowers consumers to intelligently monitor their spending and resolve unwanted “grey charges” directly with merchants via BillGuard-s mobile app or their bank-s online statements, saving everyone time and money. BillGuard has won numerous top industry awards and was named one of the top banking innovations of all time in 2012 by Online Banking Report. The company has offices in New York City and Tel Aviv and is backed by prominent investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Eric Schmidt-s Innovation Endeavors and Peter Thiel-s Founders Fund.
For more info:
Tracey Sheehy
(212) 616-6003
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