Universal Enrichment: Making All Transaction Data Useful

Anyone who’s worked with transaction data knows the pain. Merchant names are abbreviated or flat-out wrong. Categories don’t line up. Location details are missing. 

Spade has already solved this for card and transfer data. But financial institutions don’t only work with first-party data — they also rely on aggregator feeds, accounting software, even receipts. At face value, these sources help institutions capture more spend, but in practice the data is stripped down and unreliable. What should be valuable customer or business data often turns into hours of cleanup before it’s usable, if it’s ever cleaned up.

Universal Enrichment bridges that gap. It’s the catch-all endpoint that takes inconsistent, low-quality transaction strings and matches them against Spade’s proprietary database of verified businesses. The result is the same structured counterparty data — clean names, categories, and locations — no matter where the transaction originated.

From “TIERRA MIA COF gosq.com CA” to Tierra Mia Coffee

Most solutions rely on simple cleansing or rules. Spade takes a different approach: we match each transaction against our proprietary database of verified businesses, returning a persistent counterparty ID, a clean name, a reliable category, and location details.

That means instead of seeing:

PURCHASE AUTHORIZED ON 01/01 TIERRA MIA COF gosq.com CA X109912874239508

…you see "Tierra Mia Coffee" — correctly categorized as a cafe, complete with contact information, exact address, and other valuable metadata.

Why Universal Enrichment 

Financial institutions and fintechs don’t get to choose their data sources. Alongside first-party card and transfer data, they’re working with aggregator feeds, accounting software, and disparate data that all come in with different quirks and lower fidelity. Ignoring those inputs isn’t an option — they represent real spend that products and models depend on.

What customers told us they needed was a robust, unified solution that could handle every type of transaction feed without sacrificing accuracy. That’s what Universal Enrichment delivers: a single endpoint that does the hard work of normalizing messy strings, linking them to real businesses in our database, and returning structured merchant, category, and location data teams can trust.

The Impact of Enrichment at Scale

Transaction feeds are supposed to tell a story of customer spend. In practice, they don’t. Inconsistent strings, missing context, and unreliable categories turn what should be a clear signal into noise. Product and data teams end up stitching together rules for each source and spending more time managing inputs than delivering value.

With Spade’s Universal Enrichment, inputs are standardized across cards, transfers, non-first-party sources and all other types of transaction data. That means:

• Consistent reporting across feeds instead of siloed outputs.
• Cleaner inputs for models and analytics, reducing noise and improving accuracy.
• Simpler infrastructure, with one enrichment layer instead of tool-by-tool cleanup.
• Faster path to market for new features, because data pipelines are already structured.

Early Use Cases

The first adopters of Universal Enrichment are using it to solve practical data gaps left by aggregators and other non-first party data providers. 

• Accounting and bookkeeping platforms are replacing fragile rules with standardized merchant and category data. Instead of building one-off logic for every feed, they’re getting cleaner inputs that make reconciliation faster and reporting more reliable.
• Rewards providers are combining aggregator feeds with enrichment to deliver local offers. For example, where raw data just shows “SQ BLACK SEED BAGELS”*, enrichment returns the full merchant identity, category, and location — making it possible to run location-based campaigns that actually land.
• SMB-focused platforms more broadly are finding value in consistent outputs across data sources. What previously required separate pipelines for card, ACH, and aggregator data is now standardized through one endpoint.

These early use cases all point to the same outcome: teams are able to spend less time managing messy inputs and more time shipping features and delivering customer experiences that require reliable transaction data.

One API, Every Transaction Type

Spade started with card data. Then we added bank transfers. Now, with Universal Enrichment, we can handle every other type of transaction data. Whatever the source, you get clean merchant, category, and location data through the same API.

The value of transaction data depends on how usable it is. Universal Enrichment ensures it’s consistent across sources, so businesses can build once and rely on it everywhere.