Something very close to this is done with fleet cards (cards given by long-haul trucking companies to their drivers to pay for gas and other expenses). At the high-end, these cards capture a great deal of data, comparable to a receipt. (Not exactly equivalent -- it's more detailed then a typical receipt for some data fields, but doesn't include everything that can be put on a receipt). It's expensive to implement and maintain these sorts of data capture systems, since a receipt is very flexible about the data it can contain. As a result, more broad implementation doesn't make financial sense. The fraud gains are minimal. It's worth doing in the fleet card segment because it helps with a) expense tracking, b) enforcing agreements between the large trucking companies and the chain gas stations regarding fuel discounts, and c) optimizing the choice of gas station (trading off the route efficiency against lower fuel prices). When I last consulted in the industry, this kind of data capture wasn't even a close to being profitable for general-purpose credit cards. (It's been ~5 years so my knowledge may be a bit out of date.) If you scaled back the requirements, it might be feasible.
I just tried reading some about fleet cards, and found this exxon faq and this sales page. It sounds like the number of gallons gets sent automatically, and you can set up the card to prompt for an odometer reading to be sent too. This is neat, though very fuel-specific.
When you say "at the high-end, these cards capture a great deal of data, comparable to a receipt", what are you thinking of?
The fraud gains are minimal.
Why do you say that? I would expect comparing what was being purchased to a model from this user's history and a model of fraudulent
If you log into your credit card account you'll see a list of charges, each with a date, amount, and merchant. It would be helpful if this also included receipt data:
If you didn't recognize a charge, seeing what it was for could remind you.
If you needed a receipt for taxes or reimbursement one could be captured automatically.
Personal finance tools (or corporate equivalents for company cards) could track spending with higher granularity.
Because the credit card company knows what the items are they can better detect fraud.
Receipt data isn't currently part of the protocol used for charges; you'd need to spec out something that let companies communicate everything a receipt can communicate today. This would be a very large change, but everyone who would need to make changes can have incentives in the right direction:
The card company likes it because it can market their card as supporting receipts and better detect fraud.
The merchant likes it because they see fewer chargebacks and the credit card company probably gives them slightly better rates.
Point-of-sale makers like it because they get to sell a lot of upgrades.
The main downside I can think of, aside from it being a lot of work, is that people might not want their credit card company knowing the particular products they bought. The company would probably want to sell this to marketers, though there would be plenty of time to pass regulations limiting that if we wanted to. Personally, I don't mind: the merchant is probably already selling my purchase information or will soon. And the money the credit card company gets from selling the data, since it's a competitive market, probably mostly gets passed on as higher cardholder incentives or higher incentives to merchants to adopt receipt sharing.
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