Merchant enrichment API

Turn messy card descriptors into clean merchant data

One API call turns a raw statement line into a merchant name, category, website, location and payment processor, with a confidence score. Works with statements from any country, Arabic script included.

Get a free API key Read the docs

500 free enrichments a month. No credit card.

Statement line

POS 4521 CAREEM*RIDE DXB AE

Careem

✓ Verified rules

Transportation· Ride hailing Dubai, AE

0.97 https://www.careem.com

{ } View API response

{
  "descriptor": "POS 4521 CAREEM*RIDE DXB AE",
  "normalized": "CAREEM RIDE",
  "merchant": {
    "id": "mer_01M4TKG2681HHBYZWQE4FEQARK",
    "name": "Careem",
    "legal_name": null,
    "website": "https://www.careem.com",
    "logo_url": "https://cdn.descriptorapi.com/logos/careem-218be11e.png",
    "category": "transportation",
    "subcategory": "ride_hailing",
    "mcc": "4121"
  },
  "location": {
    "city": "Dubai",
    "country": "AE"
  },
  "processor": null,
  "is_subscription": false,
  "confidence": 0.97,
  "source": "rules",
  "verified": true
}

Before and after

Your users see this. They should see this.

The same eight transactions, as a bank prints them and as your app can show them. The decoded side is live output from the API.

Raw statement Decoded

Card statementOctober

12 Oct POS 4521 CAREEM*RIDE DXB AE AED 23.50
12 Oct TALABAT DUBAI 12/10 AED 64.00
11 Oct NOON.COM RIYADH SA SAR 219.00
11 Oct SALIK DUBAI AE AED 4.00
10 Oct PAYPAL *SPOTIFY 4029357733 AED 21.99
09 Oct JARIR BOOKSTORE JEDDAH SAR 89.00
08 Oct كارفور الرياض SAR 342.15
08 Oct UBER *TRIP HELP.UBER.COM AED 37.20

In your applive

Careem Transportation · Dubai AED 23.50
Talabat Food & dining · Dubai AED 64.00
NOON Shopping · Riyadh SAR 219.00
SALIK Transportation · Dubai AED 4.00
Spotify Subscriptions & streaming · via PayPal AED 21.99
Jarir Bookstore Shopping · Jeddah SAR 89.00
Carrefour Groceries · Riyadh SAR 342.15
Uber Transportation AED 37.20

How it works

Four steps, cheapest first

Every descriptor falls through the same sieve. Most stop at the first step; the AI only sees descriptors nothing else could answer, and its answer is cached so the same line never costs twice.

1 Cache Seen this exact descriptor before? Answer from memory or the database.
2 Rules Exact, prefix and regex patterns for known merchants.
3 Fuzzy Trigram match against merchant names, for typos and truncation.
4 AI Only for descriptors never seen before. The answer is cached and reviewed.

Lit up: the step that answered the example in the Decoder above.

252 countries · 1,335 cities

Reads statements the way they are written

Airport codes, English spellings and Arabic names all resolve to the same city. Payment processors and wallets are detected and peeled off, so the merchant underneath is what gets matched.

DXB · DUBAI · دبي Dubai, AE
LON · LONDON London, GB
NYC · NEW YORK New York, US
RUH · RIYADH · الرياض Riyadh, SA
BOM · MUMBAI Mumbai, IN
GRU · SAO PAULO São Paulo, BR
CAI · CAIRO · القاهرة Cairo, EG
PARIS Paris, FR
LAGOS Lagos, NG
TOKYO Tokyo, JP
NLU · MEXICO CITY Mexico City, MX
BER · BERLIN Berlin, DE
AUH · ABU DHABI · ابوظبي Abu Dhabi, AE
BIRMINGHAM Birmingham, GB
SAN FRANCISCO San Francisco, US
JED · JEDDAH · جدة Jeddah, SA

Processors and wallets we detect

PayPal
Square
Toast
Stripe
Amazon Marketplace
Apple
Google
Paddle
FastSpring
Polar
2Checkout
Digital River
Tabby
Tamara
PayTabs
Checkout.com
Geidea
Paymob
Fawry
Moyasar
HyperPay
Kashier
MyFatoorah
PayFort
Telr
Tap Payments
PaySky
OPay
Apple Pay
Google Pay
Samsung Pay

For developers

One request. One clean answer.

JSON in, JSON out, from any language. Send the descriptor and, if you have it, the card country; get back the merchant and how sure we are.

curl https://api.descriptorapi.com/v1/enrich \
  -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $DESCRIPTORAPI_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"descriptor": "POS 4521 CAREEM*RIDE DXB AE", "country": "AE", "mcc": "4121"}'

body := strings.NewReader(`{"descriptor": "POS 4521 CAREEM*RIDE DXB AE", "country": "AE", "mcc": "4121"}`)
req, _ := http.NewRequest("POST", "https://api.descriptorapi.com/v1/enrich", body)
req.Header.Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+os.Getenv("DESCRIPTORAPI_KEY"))
resp, err := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)

const res = await fetch("https://api.descriptorapi.com/v1/enrich", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.DESCRIPTORAPI_KEY}`,
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({"descriptor": "POS 4521 CAREEM*RIDE DXB AE", "country": "AE", "mcc": "4121"}),
});
const data = await res.json();

import os, requests

res = requests.post(
    "https://api.descriptorapi.com/v1/enrich",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['DESCRIPTORAPI_KEY']}"},
    json={"descriptor": "POS 4521 CAREEM*RIDE DXB AE", "country": "AE", "mcc": "4121"},
    timeout=10,
)
data = res.json()

$ch = curl_init("https://api.descriptorapi.com/v1/enrich");
curl_setopt_array($ch, [
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
    CURLOPT_POST => true,
    CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => '{"descriptor": "POS 4521 CAREEM*RIDE DXB AE", "country": "AE", "mcc": "4121"}',
    CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => [
        'Authorization: Bearer ' . getenv('DESCRIPTORAPI_KEY'),
        'Content-Type: application/json',
    ],
]);
$data = json_decode(curl_exec($ch), true);

Response · 200 OK

{
  "descriptor": "POS 4521 CAREEM*RIDE DXB AE",
  "normalized": "CAREEM RIDE",
  "merchant": {
    "id": "mer_01M4TKG2681HHBYZWQE4FEQARK",
    "name": "Careem",
    "legal_name": null,
    "website": "https://www.careem.com",
    "logo_url": "https://cdn.descriptorapi.com/logos/careem-218be11e.png",
    "category": "transportation",
    "subcategory": "ride_hailing",
    "mcc": "4121"
  },
  "location": {
    "city": "Dubai",
    "country": "AE"
  },
  "processor": null,
  "is_subscription": false,
  "confidence": 0.97,
  "source": "rules",
  "verified": true
}

In every response

Answers you can act on

Confidence scores

Every answer says how sure it is, from 0 to 1. Show high-confidence matches straight away and route the rest to review.

0.97 0.78 0.42

Verified merchants

verified: true means a person on our team approved the merchant record. AI suggestions stay unverified until they are reviewed.

✓ VerifiedUnverifiedai

Arabic, natively

Arabic-script and mixed descriptors are normalized, matched against Arabic merchant names and returned with the same clean fields.

شراء كارفور الرياض

Batch endpoint

Send up to 100 descriptors in one call. Results come back in order, and one bad line never fails the rest.

POST /v1/enrich/batch

Private by design

We need the descriptor, never the cardholder. Amounts are not stored, person-to-person transfers are never cached, and we do not train models on your data.

Fast where it counts

Descriptors we have seen before are answered from memory. Only lines nobody has sent before go further down the pipeline.

Start free, grow when you need to

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