Customers may sometimes see a charge description on their banking app or statement which does not match the statement descriptor you’ve set on the corresponding charge in Stripe. Some banks and card issuers may show a friendly, human-readable merchant name (sometimes called a "soft descriptor" or "transaction descriptor") when displaying transactions to cardholders instead of displaying the statement descriptor. The friendly name is sometimes accompanied by a logo or associated image, neither of which come from Stripe.

The primary motivation for displaying friendly names is to reduce disputes and chargebacks. If a cardholder sees a transaction labeled with an opaque statement descriptor, such as WC*WDGPUR, for example, they may not recognize the transaction and dispute the charge.

Banks and card issuers use several data points from a given transaction to determine which friendly name and logo to display, and different card issuers use different mapping systems, so the behavior is not consistent across all customers or banking systems.

Stripe has no control over the mapping systems banks and card issuers use to produce friendly names for their cardholders, and the friendly names displayed often use multiple data points from a transaction to determine which friendly name to display (only one of which may be the statement descriptor). If a bank or card issuer is mapping the wrong friendly name to a transaction, and you’ve verified the information Stripe is sending to the card network is correct, the card issuer must fix the incorrect merchant name/image mapping on their end.

For information specifically about American Express statement descriptors, please see the article linked below.

Stripe showing up instead of business name on American Express bank statement