#LDS15 VIDEO: How MasterCard Uses Its Payments Data to Understand Customers

MasterCard may make its money on payments, but the company is increasingly built on data. During a presentation at Street Fight’s Local Data Summit in Denver earlier this month, Cristobel von Walstrom, vice president of location intelligence at MasterCard Advisors, said that the company is adding information to a 10 petabyte database at a rate of 160,000 transactions per hour, delivering a range of insights about the businesses where those transactions take place.

Von Walstrom says the company is using the location information appended to transactions it processes to help retailers better understand their customer base. In on example, she said the company helped a retailer analyze their purchase transactions to find out that a high volume of visitors were coming from Brazil, and that they favored shopping at department and apparel stores.

“I think what’s exciting is not the largeness of our data,” von Walstrom said. “What’s exciting is the insights that we can generate at a local level.”