Kristin Moyer

Christophe Uzureau here.  We are seeing more and more use of payment information, or payment information combined with other data sources, to support business decisions and provide input into economic indicators. This is especially important at a time when existing indicators are failing to capture the complexity of consumer and business sentiment. The transition to electronic payments is enabling a new category of indicators, with the potential to account for the granularity of consumers/businesses confidence in the economic activity.

For instance, eBay now has a very rich data set taking into account consumers’ interest in using marketplaces to compensate for a loss of income and achieve cost savings. Combined with aggregated data from PayPal on its use outside of eBay, this could turn into an interesting indicator of the evolution of consumers’ shopping patterns and confidence for the next two years.

The opportunity is strong for banks and other payment providers with both issuing and acquiring services. They have an ability to integrate the information from those operations to design early indicators of changes in consumers’ shopping patterns. This could contribute to their own business decisions, and maybe provide their investment business with the most useful business intelligence to guide them through those troubled times.