Mastercard knows where people shop, how much they spend, and on what days - and it sells that information online.
Today, many of the companies we interact with on a daily basis have found a new revenue stream: selling their customers’ data. There are huge markets for personal data, bought by companies ranging from advertisers and tech companies, to hedge funds and data brokers.
In the last decade, Mastercard has increasingly capitalized on the transaction data it has access to in the course of being a payment network. Mastercard sells cardholder transaction data through third party online data marketplaces and through its in-house Data & Services division, giving many entities access to data and insights about consumers at an immense scale.
Mastercard is far from the only company engaged in data sales, nor is it necessarily the worst actor. But in its position as a global payments technology company, Mastercard has access to enormous amounts of information derived from the financial lives of millions, and its monetization strategies tell a broader story of the data economy that’s gone too far.
Mastercard sells bundles of cardholder transaction data to third party companies on large online data marketplaces. Here, third parties can access and use information about people’s spending to target advertisements to individuals, build models that predict consumers’ behavior, or prospect for new high-spending customers.
For example, Mastercard’s listing on Amazon Web Services Data Exchange states that companies can access data like the amount and frequency of transactions, the location, and the date and time. Mastercard creates categories of consumers based on this transaction history, like identifying “high spenders” on fast fashion or “frequent buyers” of big ticket items online, and sells these groupings, called “audiences”, to other entities. These groups can be targeted at the micro-geographic level, and even be based on AI-driven scores Mastercard assigns to consumers predicting how likely they are to spend money in certain ways within the next 3 months.