When Coast wanted tighter control over fleet card spend without unnecessarily restricting where cards could be used, standard transaction data wasn’t enough. The lack of reliable merchant and location data at authorization made real-time spend controls difficult to enforce — until Coast integrated Spade.
Impact at a glance:
- Reduced fuel fraud and card misuse through real-time, location-based authorization
- Fewer false declines on legitimate fuel and maintenance purchases
- Coast customers with fleets of 10+ vehicles report average savings of $30,000 per year using Coast’s fuel and fleet cards
The Opportunity
Coast provides fuel and fleet cards designed to give small and mid-sized businesses greater visibility and control over vehicle-related spending. To deliver on that promise, Coast needed to enforce clear rules at authorization.
Transactions had to be approved only at the right merchants, in the right locations, and for approved uses like fuel or vehicle maintenance. Enabling that level of control depends on accurate, real-time merchant identity and location data — not broad categories or inconsistent descriptors.
Before Spade
Like most open-loop programs, Coast had to work within the limits of standard card data. Merchant Category Codes are broad and inconsistent, and transaction descriptors don’t reliably identify the business or confirm where a purchase occurred. Even when enhanced data exists, it often arrives after authorization which is too late to prevent unwanted transactions.
Building and maintaining internal infrastructure to manage these custom transaction lists would have required constant updates, complex matching logic, and strict latency guarantees, all while still relying on inconsistent upstream data. Implementing this in-house would have been cumbersome and hard to scale quickly for new customers.
With Spade
Instead, Coast integrated Spade’s real-time transaction enrichment directly into its authorization flow. In under 50ms, Spade returns a verified merchant identity and precise latitude and longitude for each transaction.
That enables proximity-based authorization — approving fuel transactions only when they occur within a defined distance of an expected location. Coast also uses Spade for merchant- and category-locked cards, allowing or blocking spend at specific gas station brands or approved use cases like fuel or vehicle maintenance.
Together, these controls help Coast reduce card abuse, improve expense visibility, and streamline administration — areas customers consistently point to when describing the savings they see from using Coast’s fuel and fleet cards. More accurate, real-time transaction data allows Coast to enforce these controls reliably at authorization, rather than after the fact.
Applications Beyond Coast
Coast’s experience highlights a broader lesson for fintechs building card programs with spend controls. Real-time authorization decisions depend less on card network structure and more on data quality at the moment of the transaction. When accurate merchant and location context is available at authorization, open-loop programs can enforce precise rules, reduce fraud, and scale without adding operational complexity.