Hi, I'm Harris Lapiroff.

One thing I think is a best practice is receiving notifications on your phone for all credit and debit card transactions. Doing so allows you to

1. see if someone billed you the wrong amount in-the-moment after a sale, and
2. notice fraudulent transactions immediately.

Noticing fraudulent transactions as soon as possible is of particular importance. Credit card fraud is common. Fraud liability protections in the U.S. are very friendly to consumers – a maximum of $50 liability, by federal law. Worth noting: debit card liability protections are much less good. But in both cases, receiving maximum protection requires reporting the fraud to the card issuer promptly. (Read more on NerdWallet, because I’m not an expert.) Regularly reviewing your bank statements is one good way to catch fraud, but I’m not as consistent at that as I am at checking my phone notifications.

I’m not making so many card transactions in a day that this is particularly noisy and in practice I find it reassuring to see transactions confirmed immediately on my phone¹. Compared to the many other notifications my phone gets in a day² it’s a drop in the bucket.

Banks mostly don’t seem to assume app users want this, though most major banks offer it as a feature. Local ones are hit and miss. They all require a threshold, so the assumption seems to be that you only want to be notified of especially large transactions. (It’s worth noting that fraud often starts with small transactions to test the viability of a stolen credit card number.) I’ve found it fiddly to enable, occasionally buggy to maintain, and the notifications can look somewhat awkward. Still, here’s how I enabled it for the four banks I use and the different cards I have under them:

Citi (credit):

From the Citi mobile app:

1. Profile > Account Alerts.
2. Under “Spending” turn on notifications for “Transaction Amound Exceeds.” Citi allows you to receive alerts as notifications (“Push”) or SMS. Set the amount to $0.

Chase (credit)

From the Chase app:

1. More > Security and Privacy.
2. Under “Ways you can be more secure” there’s a button for “Activate alerts to help keep your finances safe.”
3. Select the account you want to receive alerts for.
4. Unfold “Single transaction above $X,” set the amount to 0.00 and check “Push notification.”

PNC (debit)

From the PNC app:

1. ≡ menu > Control Hub (it’s on the bottom of the screen) > Alerts & Notifications.
2. PNC organizes notifications separately for cards vs. accounts. Under my accounts I turned on Push notifications for “Pre-authorized Payment Greater Than” [ETA: after double-checking, this one actually is email-only, but I enabled that] and “Withdrawal Greater Than.” Under my debit card I turned on alerts for “Card Transaction Greater Than.” I set the threshold to each to $1 (PNC doesn’t allow $0).

FNBO (credit)

FNBO doesn’t seem to offer push notifications. Guess I’ll just have to watch that card closely. They do seem to offer SMS notifications, but you have to log in to the website to turn them on, which I haven’t gotten around to yet.³

I think banks should enable these alerts by default for app users – with options to disable or add a threshold. But until that day, I recommend enabling it yourself as a security practice.

It may be obvious, but I didn’t invent this idea. This is how the app for the now defunct banking startup Simple⁴ worked. Notifications were on by default and I realized how good it was for me to see transactions process live! Ironically Simple customers went through a series of acquisitions, ending up with PNC, which has a much less good app with notifications off by default.

1. This has actually been especially nice while traveling internationally, since it allows me to regularly confirm the exchange rate is roughly what I would expect. ↩︎

2. Which I would really like to reduce the noise of generally, but that’s another story. ↩︎

3. I got this card immediately before embarking on a current international vacation, during which I’m not receiving SMSes anyway. ↩︎

4. A large part of Simple’s premise was that they provided actually good banking software – blessedly rare, even still. ↩︎