I’m exploring credit card transaction data providers this week and sharing what I’ve learned to this channel for those who are interested. Yesterday I spoke with a rep from Commerce Signals who gave me a rundown of their data services.
Once you’ve registered, you are given access to their data dashboard which has state- and county-level credit card transactions. These transactions are broken down into several metrics like number of transactions, average transaction in dollars, number of purchases/returns, and distance per transaction to name a few. The figures show year over year growth/decline from 2019 or 2018 (sorry, I got distracted and forgot what he said about the data timeframe). They also have transactions broken down by merchant codes. I should also add that they have COVID cases as another data point in their dashboard.
Users also have access to their full dataset which does go back to 2018, and can access it via Amazon S3, similar to the data providers in this community.
Also similar to other data providers, their data is a representative sample, in the ball park of 12% to 13% of all card transactions and in line with data from census and credit bureaus.
They also tie in psychographic data from Claritas PRIZM. However, I believe access to that data is not included in the free account.
Commerce Signals was recently acquired by Verisk Financial, which adds another level of bureaucracy to the registration process, so as of the time of this post I have yet to receive access to the service - and I registered yesterday afternoon.
I asked about do’s and don’ts when it comes to data sharing. The rep said the user agreement is pretty open when it comes to their COVID-related data. Basically short of using the data for criminal enterprises and terrorism, you are open to share the data so long as you give credit. Also, you can’t give this data to investors or others in the financial services realm. However, I should note that I did not read the user agreement very carefully and just relaying what the rep said.