
Spade enriches raw card, ACH and wire transactions into verified merchant records for banks and fintechs, and now sells predictions built on the same data.
Spade sells to banks and fintechs that need to know who a card transaction actually paid. It grew revenue 470% in 2025 by its own report, but pricing is sales-led and its docs and homepage disagree on regions, so an evaluation starts with questions rather than a trial.
A verified merchant and location record for each transaction at a P99 under 40 ms by Spade's own account, so enrichment can sit inside a live card authorization.
Spade says its Merchant Graph covers 99.9% of US and Canadian businesses and that it processed up to 1.9 billion transactions a day in 2025 (March 2026 press release, as reported by PYMNTS); its docs say match rates rise as it optimizes on customer traffic.
Main trade-off
No public pricing or self-serve access, and the speed and coverage figures are the company's own.
No public pricing. Spade's docs say access starts with an email to sales@spade.com or the Request Access form on spade.com, and the premium data fields and file delivery they list are agreed with sales. No free tier is published.
Spade is a transaction-data platform founded in 2021 that matches raw card, ACH and wire strings to verified merchants. It sells verified merchant and location data fast enough for live card authorization, and it closed a Series B led by Oak HC/FT in March 2026.
Authorization-time enrichment
Returns a merchant name, logo, website and location for a card transaction, and Spade says P99 processing is under 40 ms, though its API docs still say sub-50 ms.
Merchant Graph coverage
Matches transactions to a verified record of 99.9% of US and Canadian businesses with over 99% accuracy, per Spade, while the docs say it currently focuses on US merchants.
Spade categories
Replaces Merchant Category Codes with its own category hierarchy, which the October 2026 changelog added to merchant search results.
Action triggers and batches
Fires actions when a matching merchant appears, with up to 300,000 active triggers per scope since June 2026, and enriches files through batch and microbatch endpoints.
Spade Predictions
A transaction foundation model, featured as news on the homepage on 13 November 2026, that predicts which product, segment or merchant fits each customer; Spade's own case study says a fine-tuned model beat a US bank's propensity model by 35%.
Error reporting
An endpoint lets customers flag a wrong location, category, logo, website or phone number, and since August 2026 it returns a report ID to track.
The nearest AI tools on Hokai for the same job.
| Tool | Price from | Free plan | Runs on | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quote | No | Web | 3.6 | |
| Quote | No | Web · iOS · Android | 3.7 | |
| -- | -- | Web | 3.7 | |
| Quote | No | Web | 3.4 |
Proprietary merchant graph and enrichment models
Spade publishes no price list. Its docs FAQ says to email sales@spade.com or use Request Access on spade.com, and any premium data fields or file delivery are scoped with the sales team. Hokai found no per-transaction rate, platform fee or minimum on a vendor page, so those terms are unknown until a quote arrives.
Not from what Spade publishes. The API docs and a sandbox host are described publicly, and the status page covers sandbox and production, but the docs FAQ says access begins by contacting sales. No free tier or self-serve trial appears on the site. On 13 November 2026 that public status page showed both environments operational, and, by Spade's own count, no recorded downtime over the past 90 days.
Spade's homepage and Series B post say P99 enrichment under 40 milliseconds and 99.9% coverage of US and Canadian merchants with over 99% accuracy. Its API docs FAQ still says sub-50 ms and says it currently focuses on enriching US merchants. All of these figures are the company's own, so test them on your own transaction sample.
Spade's security page lists SOC 2 Type II certification, OWASP Top 10 development standards and GDPR-aligned data handling, with services on AWS. The Predictions page adds that Spade never receives personally identifiable information. Ask for the SOC 2 report itself during procurement, since the page gives no audit date.
It is a transaction foundation model that predicts what each customer is likely to want next, such as a card, mortgage or student loan, which segment they belong to and which merchants they will visit. One case study on its site reports that a model fine-tuned for a US bank's lending programme beat that bank's traditional propensity model by 35%. The bank is not named, so treat the figure as a vendor claim.
Spade is a transaction-data company founded in 2021 that turns raw card, ACH and wire strings into verified merchant records, so a bank or fintech knows who a customer actually paid and where. Its CEO, Oban MacTavish, wrote in the 24 March 2026 Series B post that Spade is moving from an enrichment API to a data and AI platform, and its homepage now describes the company as the data and AI platform for modern finance. Hokai files it under AI financial assistants because the taxonomy has no payments-data shelf.
Each transaction is matched against Spade's Merchant Graph, which Spade describes as a verified record of nearly all US and Canadian businesses, and comes back with a merchant name, logo, website, location and a Spade category rather than a Merchant Category Code. Spade says enrichment is fast enough to sit inside a live card authorization. The service is hosted on Amazon Web Services, and its API documentation describes card, transfer, universal, batch and microbatch enrichment, merchant search, action triggers and file delivery. In 2026 the changelog added microbatching in May, larger action-trigger registrations in June and a category hierarchy in merchant search in October.
The buyers are risk and fraud teams at card issuers and processors, product teams building rewards or spend analytics at fintechs, and data teams that want clean labels for models. Named customers on its site include Bilt, Coast and Mercury, each with a case study, and press coverage records Stripe and Bilt partnerships from February 2025. A newer product, Spade Predictions, uses a transaction foundation model to estimate which product, segment or merchant fits each customer.
Who should look elsewhere: anyone who wants to try before talking to sales, because access starts with an email or a Request Access form and no price list exists. Teams that need merchants outside North America should read the regions answer first, since the docs say Spade currently focuses on US merchants. Ntropy, whose homepage pitches enriched financial data for underwriting, and Heron Data, which sells bank-statement scrubbing to lenders and brokers, solve neighbouring problems; neither has a Hokai record yet.
Product facts on this page (pricing, plans, integrations, compliance) are read from Spade's own pages and documentation. The verdict is Hokai's reading of them, not the vendor's claim.