MasterCard has started selling its data to advertisers and marketers to help them create targeted campaigns.

The credit card company’s MasterCard Advisors Media Solutions Group is able to provide companies with information telling them when customers are likely to spend and who is most likely to buy their products. “What if you could know the biggest week for spend and then reach those shoppers who are twice as likely to spend leading up to that week and then create campaigns?” asked Susan Grossman, senior vice president at MasterCard Advisors Media Solutions Group in an online presentation entitled “Leveraging MasterCard Data Insights to Reach Holiday Shoppers”

MasterCard, which processes 34 billion transactions a year in 210 countries and territories, said it started the initiative in February. To build a targeted audience which can then be sold to a company, MasterCard starts with billions of anonymous transaction, which it then aggregates into small segments which comprise of similar transactions. When they create an audience the analytics is performed on these segments and not individuals....Read more here: MasterCard sells its data to marketers