Intelligent Assistant Making Online Shopping Easier & Safer

Consumers today have more ways to shop and pay than ever before, but with the increased convenience of online shopping also comes new concerns about how to best control and protect your financial information online.

When we looked at this challenge, we found that one of the pressing problems our customers face is that giant ‘reset’ moment when either your card expires, it’s lost or stolen, or it’s compromised online. And that becomes this moment, out of the blue, when you are asked to spend a couple of hours updating your numbers. Your credit card comes with fraud protection of course, but it’s a huge hassle to deal with that ‘reset’ moment.

If you’re like me, you struggle to remember all of the places where you’ve stored your credit card number online — from Amazon to Netflix to Spotify to that small merchant selling those artisan chocolates that you stumbled upon while searching for that perfect Valentine’s Day gift last year. It’s hard to stay on top of it all.

In fact, in a recent consumer survey we conducted, 60 percent of Americans said they weren’t confident they could identify all of the places where their card information was stored online. Add security concerns on top of that — with the seemingly never-ending stream of security breaches, it’s not surprising that more than 8 in 10 Americans said they are concerned about their ability to protect their card information online.

These are the silent anxieties weighing on us that lead to that moment of hesitation at the point of making a purchase online — where you find yourself questioning if you really want to store your credit card information on that small merchant site that you aren’t quite sure you can trust and wondering if those artisan chocolates are really worth taking the risk of your card details falling into the wrong hands. We found that our customers were actually steering their shopping to a few sites that they know and already trust and they are actually avoiding trying new products or services.

More than 1/3 of consumers surveyed said they’d made a purchase with their card on a website they didn’t completely trust in the past year. For millennials, that number gets even higher, with over 1/2 saying they’d recently made a purchase on a site they didn’t fully trust.

eCommerce can and should be easier and safer. And that was the impetus behind the latest digital product innovation we previewed at the SXSW Interactive Festival this week. We previewed new capabilities to help provide our customers with greater control and security over their online shopping experience.

Introducing virtual numbers from Eno

Last year at SXSW, we announced the launch of Eno, Capital One’s intelligent assistant. Since last year, we have continued to expand Eno’s capabilities in new ways to enhance our customers’ financial lives, and today, we announced that Eno had extended its capabilities to help our customers with their online shopping experience.

With Eno, Capital One cardholders can now shop online without using their real credit card number — giving customers greater control over where their credit card information is stored and eliminating hassles and manual work when cards are lost or stolen.

How it works

Eno can instantly serve up unique, merchant-specific virtual card numbers for your Capital One credit cards. Your virtual card numbers will be saved for ongoing and future payments and all charges will appear on your statement, as they normally would.

Eno’s single source of truth — the comprehensive control panel where customers can view and manage their entire virtual number portfolio — makes it easy to understand and manage everywhere cards are used and stored online.

Through the control panel, you can lock and unlock your virtual numbers for specific merchants without affecting your actual credit card.

Building virtual numbers from Eno

One of the biggest technical challenges in bringing virtual numbers to life was making it seamless on the merchant end. Ecommerce sites generally have sensitive triggers that will cancel transactions that seem like they don’t come from a real physical credit card. The team had to make absolutely sure that virtual card numbers were indecipherable from physical credit card numbers, as least as far as the merchant could tell.

It’s really challenging for the retailer to change their systems to accommodate an entirely different format. We knew that if this would get widespread adoption, the consumer had to be able to use it just like a normal number.

Following beta, Eno will expand into other platforms and add additional capabilities to make your online shopping even easier and safer, such as the ability to set transaction limits, time limits on specific merchant cards, and create virtual cards for one-time use.

Virtual numbers are the latest way Eno is helping Capital One customers in the moment and meeting them where and when it matters — in this case while shopping online.

So, go ahead, and get those artisanal chocolates … Eno’s got your back.

For more information on Eno virtual numbers: https://www.capitalone.com/applications/eno/virtualnumbers/