9F4E

Merchant Name and Location is the human-readable string a terminal supplies naming the merchant and its address - content meant for receipts, dispute documentation, and cardholder-facing statements rather than for anything the transaction's own authorization or cryptogram logic reads. It's related to the Merchant Identifier (9F16, covered earlier), which is the machine-readable, structured counterpart to this free-text field: 9F16 is what systems match against programmatically, while 9F4E is what a human actually reads on a statement or receipt when trying to recognise a charge. Because the two carry the same underlying fact in genuinely different formats, a discrepancy between them - a 9F16 that resolves correctly in an acquirer's records but a 9F4E that displays a garbled or outdated merchant name - is a data-quality issue worth catching independently of whether the transaction itself processed correctly, since it's exactly the kind of mismatch that generates cardholder confusion and unnecessary dispute filings. See EMV 4.4 Book 3.