Today, Spade primarily works with fintechs, including embedded-finance fintech Unit, corporate-card upstart Ramp, startup-focused neobank Mercury, and fraud-prevention fintech Sardine. And for its part, Spade, which plugs into clients via an API, makes money through a fee every time a customer swipes a card, MacTavish said. Spade is backed by machine learning technology that quickly scans its large database, combining disparate sources, from state registries to third-party data providers. Then, it links the transaction to a verified merchant identity and returns detailed information about the business, like category, geolocation, and even hours of operation. When a card is swiped, Spade receives the data from the issuer in real time.

The startup matches a customer transaction to a merchant in its sizable database that has coverage across 99.9% of the country, which includes everything from a mom-and-pop diner in Seattle to a national grocery chain with multiple locations on the same block. A standard poker deck yields only four ways to make a royal flush, as the royal flush stands. The official definition of royal flush is a ten-to-ace straight with all five cards of matching suits.

Instead of reinventing a global communication standard, Spade offers payments players a second one. Royal flushes top all other hands in the poker hand rankings and are mathematically the rarest made hands that you can draw from a 52-card poker deck. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.

Spade in poker