Guide: How to Check Merchant Category Code (MCC)

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Knowing the Merchant Category Code (MCC) is useful to help us meet the requirements of conditional cards. Citi Cash Back, for instance, gives its high 8% on groceries, and such transactions must be tagged as MCC 5411. If you buy groceries for a shop that isn’t categorised under this MCC, you will not get your 8% cashback.

How then do we know if a particular grocery store fulfils the MCC?

Visa Supplier Locator

There were a few methods here and there to find out the MCC previously, but they weren’t very elegant nor convenient. Thankfully, we now have the Visa Supplier Locator that’d help us conveniently identify the MCCs of merchants.

To use the tool:

• Type in Singapore (don’t press enter or select any location) for the city
• Type in the name of the merchant under Supplier Name
• Leave everything else alone and input the CAPTCHA to submit the form

You’d then get a list of merchants that match the search query you’ve typed in, along with the MCCs:

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Some things to take note

Do note that trade names may differ from the company name. For instance, I could incorporate a company called XYZ Pte Ltd and operate a Subway franchise, and that may not show up as “Subway” in the results, so a little sleuthing by Googling or matching the business address may have to be done.

Also, since this is a Visa tool, there may be rare occasions where you use a MasterCard and it does not give the same MCC as what Visa categorises it as.

Nevertheless, given how MCCs have been crowdsourced information for a long time now, having a tool that can remove much of the guesswork is an essential tool for people chasing credit card rewards.

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