NEW YORK, NY — (Marketwired) — 07/25/13 — , the leading personal finance protection company, today unveiled its free app for iPhone, offering the only tool for combatting the $14 billion dollars lost by American cardholders to unwanted “.” Two years in the making, the BillGuard iPhone App is the culmination of the company-s pioneering work, crowdsourcing and analyzing millions of consumer-disputed transactions.
The new app offers consumers a smart, fast way to track their credit and debit card spending and facilitates hassle-free refunds and subscription cancellations directly with merchants. With the help of a self-learning “Smart Inbox,” users can swipe through prioritized charges in an email-like interface. Working together, users identify charges that are questionable and provide community-edited merchant information that can help others quickly recognize even cryptic charges. When a charge is repeatedly disputed by others it is prioritized for all cardholders with a similar charge for their quick review.
“We have built the largest crowdsourced transaction monitoring community in the world,” said BillGuard co-founder and CTO Raphael Ouzan. “As consumers ourselves we realized early on that bill checking for most people is a long arduous task that most would prefer to avoid. So we set out to develop a tool that would make bill checking fast, fun and exceptionally effective, with a little help from some very sophisticated algorithms and millions of fellow cardholders.”
BillGuard-s engine, heralded by Online Banking Report as “one of the top online banking innovations of all time,” has identified over $50 million in grey charges so far. “Our data shows that if every American cardholder used the BillGuard iPhone app, the total annual savings in grey charges could top $7 billion,” said Ouzan.
The free BillGuard iPhone App enables consumers to:
Quickly verify prioritized charges with just a swipe
Get alerts to unwanted grey charges on their credit and debit cards
Recognize any charge with community-edited merchant information
Contact merchants directly from the app to resolve billing inquiries and disputes
Stay on top of account balances and recurring charges for all cards in one app
Add any card to Passbook for convenient one tap access
Protect two credit or debit cards for free*
*To celebrate its launch week, BillGuard is making its premium upgrade, which supports 10 cards, available for a one-time in-app purchase of $9.99. Download the app .
Continuing its mission to protect consumers from grey charges, BillGuard today also released the 2013 Industry Report on Grey Charges, a first-of-its kind study revealing that American cardholders were hit with $14.3 billion in deceptive grey charges in 2012. for more information about the report.
BillGuard is the Transaction Intelligence Network enabling trusted commerce via credit cards, debit cards and digital wallets, by harnessing the inputs of millions of consumers and merchants and financial service providers. This crowdsourced knowledge empowers consumers to intelligently monitor their spending and resolve unwanted “grey charges” directly with merchants via BillGuard-s mobile app or their bank-s online statements, saving everyone time and money. BillGuard has won numerous top industry awards and was named one of the top banking innovations of all time in 2012 by Online Banking Report. The company has offices in New York City and Tel Aviv and is backed by prominent investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Eric Schmidt-s Innovation Endeavors and Peter Thiel-s Founders Fund.
For more info:
Tracey Sheehy
(212) 616-6003
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