# Support
source: https://developer.mastercard.com/small-business-credit-analytics/documentation/support/index.md

## FAQ {#faq}

#### General {#general}

Insights reflect sales activity (Mastercard network transactions only) at small businesses. Mastercard has a sizable share of the credit and debit card market to provide a strong signal on small business performance. Small Business Credit Analytics can be used for decisions across several types of loans including small business (SMB) cards, term loans, lines of credit, merchant cash advances, and others. It may also be utilized for monitoring the performance of an SMB over the lifetime of a loan. The Acquirer Merchant ID along with Counrty, or Name and Address are matched against the cleansed data from Mastercard Transactions. Currently SBCA supports matching by either Acquirer Merchant ID, or Merchant Name and Address.


A Merchant ID or Acquirer Merchant ID is a unique identifier assigned to a business by a payment processor for tracking and processing electronic transactions. There are a few reasons no matches may be found, such as the merchant not accepting Mastercard.

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You may conduct a data evaluation on your current loan portfolio to assess the lift of the data on underwriting outcomes before onboarding to the API. Please [contact us](mailto:advisors.help@mastercard.com?subject=SBCA:) for more information. The contract needs to specifically call out any third parties who will need access to the API. Please contact your Mastercard representative for more details. Currently, SBCA is supported in USA, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. To find out more about supported features and upcoming countries on the roadmap, contact your Mastercard representative.

#### API and Metrics {#api-and-metrics}

The Small Business Credit Analytics API provide two types of aggregated sales metrics:

* Retail Sales Analytics, which consists of up to 45 near real-time data-driven insights for the last 12 months used to assist underwriters with understanding a merchant's performance.
* Retail Sales Benchmarks, which consists of up to 14 monthly metrics (weighted average indices) for the latest month used to help understand a merchant's relative performance to its benchmark peer set.

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SBCA metrics are based on aggregated and anonymized Mastercard transaction data, and are subject to applicable laws and regulations as well as internal Mastercard analytics guidelines and standards.

See a sample response in the API Reference section or for the full list of possible merchant metrics and their definitions, contact your Mastercard representative or [Mastercard support team](mailto:advisors.help@mastercard.com?subject=SBCA:). Access to some metrics may differ based on contract and country specific policies.
* Retail Sales Analytics metrics are delivered with 12 months of data in weekly and monthly aggregations
* Retail Sales Benchmarks metrics are delivered with 1 month of data in monthly aggregation
* You may refer to the periodStartDate and periodEndDate in the API response to view the timeframe of the selected metrics
* Retail Sales Analytics metrics are updated every week for the latest available week of metrics that can be retrieved, for weekly metrics.
* Retail Sales Analytics metrics are updated every month for the latest available month of metrics that can be retrieved, for monthly metrics.
* Retail Sales Benchmarks metrics are updated every month for the latest available month of metrics that can be retrieved.
The "has_consent" parameter indicates whether you have prior consent from the relevant small business to retrieve their metrics from the API. In order to retrieve the metrics, you must have consent, as laid out in the written agreement in place with Mastercard. There are two API calls required (and therefore two payloads returned) to obtain metrics from Small Business Credit Analytics. The maximum size is no greater than 100KB for the output from the first API call (merchant match), and the maximum size is no greater than 5MB for the output from the second API call (Retail Sales Analytics / Retail Sales Benchmarks metric retrieval). The competitor peer set for a particular merchant location is identified in consideration of factors such as Industry Type, Geographic Location and Spend Bracket, as may be appropriate. Reversed amount (reversed_amt) refers to the total spend amount of returned purchases, which is recorded as a negative value to reflect the offsetting effect of the transactions. These values describe cases where there is low transaction volume or no recent transactions at a merchant location. For YoY metrics, the following are also possible responses. You can find their descriptions below:

* 0: If no transactions were observed to calculate the respective metrics in that period
  * E.g. Zero amount of spend at the merchant location
* null: If the minimum number of transactions needed to calculate the respective metrics was not met in that period, or for YoY metrics when there were no data points in the previous year
* -1: For YoY metrics only, in the event that there were no data points in the current year
  * E.g. If there were 50 transactions in the previous year but no transactions in the current year, YoY growth would be calculated as (0-50)/50, which would lead to -1 as a returned response
These values describe cases where there is low transaction volume or no recent transactions at the merchant location or its benchmark peer set in the specified period-

* 0: If no transactions were observed for the respective metrics at the merchant location
* null: If the minimum number of transactions needed to calculate the respective metrics was not met for the merchant location
* -1: If there are transactions at the merchant location but insufficient transactions in the competitor peer set.
The metrics do not distinguish between domestic and cross-border transactions.

#### Support {#support}

In the event that your team experiences issues, write to [Mastercard support team](mailto:advisors.help@mastercard.com?subject=SBCA:%20Issue%20with%20(Describe%20Issue%20Here)), and outline the following:

* Email Subject: SBCA: Issue with (Describe Issue Here)
* Body: Include details about the nature of the request, along with screenshots if possible to help expedite the resolution.
[This page](https://developer.mastercard.com/api-status) informs Mastercard Developers users of the statuses of each API.

## Get Help {#get-help}

### Contact us for technical Support. {#contact-us-for-technical-support}