Mastercard is now selling your data.

Credit card companies make money by taking a cut every time you swipe your plastic at the checkout counter. Now MasterCard has found a way to make those swipes pay over and over again. 

As the Financial Times first reported, MasterCard is packaging its transaction data — your transaction data — and selling it to advertisers. The story was based on an apparently confidential pitch MasterCard made to potential clients. Not too confidential, because we found a copy by googling it.

In the presentation, “Leveraging MasterCard Data Insights to Reach Holiday Shoppers,” MasterCard senior vice president Susan Grossman describes the many ways the company can mine the 34 billion transactions made using MasterCards every year for data that advertisers can use to target specific audiences.

When a consumer swipes a credit card in a store, she says MasterCard’s data-packaging division receives information about the date, time, amount and merchant. By aggregating that data and comparing it to its deep well of historical data on spending patterns, Grossman says MasterCard can then divide up consumers into millions of audience “segments.”

It’s unclear how your offline MasterCard purchases would follow you online to make you a target for specific ads. In the presentation, Grossman called MasterCard’s methods “proprietary.” But she says none of the data collected or sold includes personally identifiable information such as names or addresses.

The data is available mainly to ad networks and data exchanges, the mostly invisible technological guts of internet advertising that facilitate the hugely lucrative business of using your own data to target you with ads. While search engines and social networks depend almost entirely on ad-targeting tech to make money, payment companies like MasterCard and retailers like Amazon are just starting to exploit their vast stores of data on consumer behavior to get into the online ad game. It wouldn’t be surprising if other major credit card companies decided to do something similar, though the party could be cut short if the “Do Not Track” movement takes off. But given the profits at stake, advertisers and the platforms that serve them are already manning the barricades to keep you in view.  
http://www.wired.com/business/2012/10/mastercard-data-mining-holidays/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Top+Stories%29

MasterCard mines purchase data for analytics.

Credit card giant MasterCard has rolled out a new analytics offering that draws on purchase data to predict buying patterns. The company is offering that analysis to BlueKai, which can make it available to ad networks through its platform.

For the initiative, MasterCard is mining data from 34 billion annual transactions. The company then sifts through aggregated, anonymous data to figure out how that activity can predict people's propensity to make certain kinds of future purchases -- such as meals in restaurants.

MasterCard then shares that analytics data with BlueKai, which makes it available to ad networks. A MasterCard spokesperson tells Online Media Daily that the data is never attached to any particular Web users via cookies. The program is only available in the U.S.

MasterCard says that users can opt out of having data about their purchases mined for analytics.

The credit card giant launched the analytics program in February, but it didn't draw notice until this week, when a story about the initiative appeared in the Financial Times.

MasterCard also did a Web presentation last month, "Leveraging MasterCard Data Insights to Reach Holiday Shoppers," which offered more details about the program.

For example, Susan Grossman, senior vice president, media solutions, said during the presentation that MasterCard could run "propensity models" to determine the characteristics of people who are likely to make a home-improvement purchase within 30 days. "Once we've defined our audience, it can be applied to third-party consumer populations and on-boarded, making it available for sale on BlueKai," Grossman said.

A MasterCard spokesman added that an ad network could purchase that information through BlueKai to use in an ad campaign.
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/185403/mastercard-mines-purchase-data-for-analytics.html