Card Spending Data

Debit and credit card spending data is the information and details related to financial transactions consumers make using their debit cards and credit cards, instead of cash or a check.

With more than 3 in 4 adults holding at least one credit card — and more than 90% of all purchases made using some type of card (instead of check or cash) — there is more debit and credit card spending data available than ever before .

In general, debit and credit card transaction data includes specifics like (but not necessarily limited to):

• When and how certain purchases are made, including whether customers are buy items online or from physical locations
  

• What type of debit or credit card was used to make purchases
  

• Whether and how often card purchases are accepted or declined (and if the card was declined, the reason for the decline may also be recorded)
  

• General categories for items purchased, like food, clothing, or services
  

• The type of currency associated with transactions (for purchases outside of the U.S.)
  

• Discounts or deals applied to purchases
  

• Information regarding the point of sale systems used to process payments

Please note that Facteus’s debit card spending and credit card transaction data is all anonymized, meaning that private, sensitive, and identifying information related to individual cardholders is encrypted or erased and is never accessible or disclosed.

Given the wealth of insights that debit and credit card spending data can provide, this information is commonly used by parties like the following:

• Retailers

• Logistics teams

• Investors

• Analysts

• Researchers

• Hedge funds

• Others

Market research describes the process or products of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data for a specific sector or industry. Credit card transaction data, as well as alternative data in general, can offer unparalleled insights when it comes to market research, competitor intelligence, market share, and more.

Businesses, investors, and others use credit card transaction data in market research to:

• Obtain competitive intelligence: Examining credit card spending data can uncover where, when, and how much consumers are spending at major retailers, best-in-class competitors, and even affiliates and industry partners. That can open up extraordinary competitor intelligence, along with novel opportunities for competitive research and competitor monitoring.

• Improve their understanding of market share: With credit card transaction data that yields powerful competitive intelligence, leaders and others are able to get a better grip on their own market share, both for specific products and services and as a company in the wider industry setting.

• Zero in on consumer behaviors: With consumer spending and transaction data in hand, it’s possible to connect the dots between seasons, spending patterns, and customer behaviors. That can help decision-makers gain a much deeper understanding of the size, demographics, and geographic location and distribution of their current and target customers, so they can better meet or anticipate their needs.

• Predict the next shopping trends: What’s next in consumer spending? Where will folks be letting loose and spending more — and where and when will they tighten up the purse strings? CC data can start to answer those questions, uncovering trends in consumer behavior so that corporate leaders and others can be responsive and make the most of these insights. That can mean getting the jump on the latest industry shifts and developments, as well as the impacts of hot new tech and evolving consumer behaviors.

With the right market research, informed decision-making and opportunities to refine current strategies and positioning can come to light. So can all-new competitive intelligence, connecting leaders and others with critical information that can sharpen their competitive edge.

Competitive Intelligence (CI) refers to the process and products of investigating, analyzing, and interpreting data associated with a business’s competitors. Focused on revealing insights about similar companies in a given space, competitive intelligence is a high-value asset for any business looking to grow. That’s because the right competitive intelligence can uncover:

• The competition’s strength and weaknesses

• Market trends, consumer behaviors, and industry dynamics

• Opportunities to be first-to-market or best-in-class for different offerings

With that, modern businesses use competitive intelligence in their planning, forecasting, and industry analyses to:

• Improve their understanding of the competitive landscape

• Make more strategic choices to better position a business for long-term success

• Anticipate and quickly respond to emerging challenges, shifting customer demands, and disruptive technologies

• Adapt, improve, and craft more impactful products, messaging, and customer experiences

• Allocate resources more effectively, so they’ll have the greatest impact and potential for maximum ROI

Knowledge is power when it comes to competitive intelligence, and these days, more competitive intelligence and market research relies on alternative data, including:

• Debit card transaction data

• Credit card spending data

• Retailer spending data

• Holiday shopping data

• And more.

By dialing into the right competitive intelligence, any company can gain radically powerful insights, better eyes on new opportunities, and more chances to capitalize on emerging consumer trends and behaviors. That can fuel all-new growth and sustainable success.

Debit and credit card transaction data can be leveraged in several ways to uncover all-new insights and powerful understandings of how to:

Be proactive, stay agile and quickly adapt

Develop and maintain a customer-centric approach

Meet and exceed customer expectations.

Better navigate competitive or uncertain markets

To do that and more, many use credit and debit card spending data in their efforts to:

Refine their marketing and make it more personal: With a deeper understanding of individual spending and shopping habits, retailers can design promotions that resonate with customer preferences and foster loyalty.

Streamline and improve operations: Knowing when demand and purchases peak, leaders and others can get ahead of those surges, refining their scheduling, their operations, and even their logistics to deliver better customer experiences.

Enhance data-driven decision-making: The insights gleaned from transaction data can drive strategic choices, from enhancing the online shopping experience to expanding delivery capabilities, ensuring they align with customer expectations.

Make more strategic investments: With eyes on consumer spending and shopping trends, analysts, investors, and others can uncover new patterns, dial into more subtle market trends, and be better informed when it’s time to make or evaluate investments.

Improve their competitive benchmarking and financial forecasting: Companies and their leaders can efficiently and effectively compare their performance, strategies, and practices with best-in-class businesses, as well as industry peers. That can result in more effective benchmarking and more informed quarterly and annual projections.

Get better competitive intelligence and actionable market research: Beyond benchmarking, credit card transaction data can also provide market, competitor, and corporate intelligence that uncovers strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats companies face, giving leaders the chance to address each of those facets, so they can set organizations up for next-level success.

Keep in mind that these are not the only use cases for credit card and debit card transaction data — and that card transaction data can be paired with other data, like banking data, for additional insights (like uncovering consumer gambling trends).

Also, new uses for this data are arising all the time, particularly when coupled with generative AI.

Using credit card and debit card data in competitive benchmarking can assist retailers (and others) in:

• Identifying untapped markets

• Developing better expansion plans

• Understanding exactly who their customers are, where they come from, and what it will take to improve customer satisfaction

• Pricing and promoting their offerings more effectively

• Better engaging customers (and potential customers) in various channels

• Financial forecasting

• Obtaining unrivaled competitive intelligence

• Enhancing competitor research, monitoring, and tracking

• Building more insightful market research and market intelligence to sharpen a competitive edge even more

Consequently, credit card and debit card transaction data is often used for competitive intelligence and benchmarking in retail and other industries marked by significant consumer spending on debit cards and credit cards.

When used in Share of Wallet analyses, debit card and credit card spending data can provide more extensive insights into company performance, a customer base, and what it takes to grow revenue — and outpace the competition — in a given niche, a wider market, or an entire industry. That can yield several benefits, especially with regards to:

• Pinpointing high-value customers, products, or services

• Nurturing customer relationships or cultivating stronger customer loyalty

• Refining pricing strategies and marketing campaigns

• Discovering underlying trends in a narrow or boarder market

• Highlighting more stable revenue streams and new opportunities for growth

• Improving and expanding a business

• Developing or updating investment strategies

Ultimately, debit and credit card transaction data can provide priceless insights into spending patterns, preferences, and trends, offering extraordinary power to make more informed decisions in real time.

Better decision-making: With a deeper understanding of their customers and their spending patterns, retailers can make more informed decisions about product assortment, pricing strategies, and marketing initiatives, ultimately leading to improved business performance.

POS data, debit card data, and credit card transaction data can all be used to analyze consumer spending behaviors and shopping patterns, but these terms are not interchangeable.

In fact, they all describe distinct datasets and, therefore, provide unique insights about different aspects of customer shopping and customer transactions. Specifically:

• POS data or “point-of-sale” data typically describes receipt-type data, with itemized lists of the products and/or services a consumer buys during a given transaction. For example, POS data for a grocery store transaction would list the products a shopper purchased in that “spending event,” like milk, cheese, apples, and cereal. Consequently, POS data can include some CPG and SKU data.

• Credit card transaction data, along with debit card transaction data, refers to the information generated and exchanged between a point-of-sale system and the credit card company (or bank), as the card is used to make a purchase. As such, this info doesn’t detail each item that was purchased; instead, it captures specifics about the purchase itself. Consequently, credit card and debit card transaction data generally includes details about total purchase amounts, merchants where purchases were made, the time and date of purchases, the frequency of purchases at a given business, and more.

Put another way, POS data and credit card transaction data focus on different information, with varying levels of coverage and granularity about consumer spending. This distinction means that each alt dataset can reveal its own unique findings related to card transactions and customer spending, with varying degrees of micro- and macro-level insights.

Facteus, a leading alternative data provider, offers the most holistic, stable view of consumer spending and transaction data across income cohorts and demographics. With Pulse, we offer near real-time insights into business KPIs, consumer spending shifts, and card transaction trends.

Specifically, Pulse offers the power to derive extraordinary understandings of card transactions across more than 100 million unique cardholders and upwards of 42 billion transactions.

The results provide exceptional insights and the industry’s lowest forecast errors while capturing about 4% to 5% of all consumer spending in the nation. That, in turn, delivers novel ways to expand and deepen competitive intelligence, market research, customer intelligence, and so much more.