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Withdraw cash from the wrong ATM in central Prague and you can pay tens or hundreds of crowns more than you should. Independent operators like Euronet apply withdrawal fees that vary by card type and country of issue, with foreign cards consistently charged the most. The fees are not the only problem - it's the density of these ATMs and the lack of clear information about them that turns an ordinary cash withdrawal into a costly guessing game.

When PSD2 came into effect in 2018, Account Information Service Providers got a formal identity. Banks had to open their APIs to licensed third parties, and consumers gained the legal right to let those third parties access their payment account data. Seven years later, hundreds of AISPs are registered across Europe, and the model has spread to the UK, Brazil, Australia, and parts of the Middle East.

Open any banking app, scroll a recent transaction feed, and the friction usually starts in the same place: a row of cryptic capital letters where a merchant name should be. That row is the payment description - the short text string that comes through with the transaction and lands in the app next to the amount. It is the single field that most determines whether a customer recognises what they bought, who they paid, and whether the charge is legitimate. Banks rarely control it, and in its raw form, it is rarely good enough to display.