ad tech

Visa is shutting down its personal data business for advertisers

The company told Marketing Brew it will “sunset” Visa Ad Solutions. Now the question is, why?
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We broke a little news on Friday night: Visa is shutting down the business it uses to sell personal data.

Called Visa Ad Solutions, it gave advertisers access to purchasing information from Visa’s massive customer base (which holds a market share of 60% of credit and debit card users), aggregated by anonymous consumer segments like “high spenders” or “department store” spenders, “new movers,” and “smartphone early adopters,” which could also be segmented to specific zip codes.

This data could then be matched with the identity information that advertisers (and their partners) could keep on file.

  • Mastercard also has a data business.
  • So does American Express, which sells its anonymous data to marketers through analytics company Wiland.

“We made a strategic decision to sunset Visa Ad Solutions and focus our resources on providing our clients with other data-driven services,” Melissa McSherry, Visa’s SVP and global head of data, security, and identity products, told Marketing Brew via a statement.

Related, unrelated: Though Visa and other data providers say what they’re giving advertisers is anonymous and aggregated, nothing is really anonymous.

  • In 2015, MIT researchers studied three months’ worth of credit card records—and found that 90% of 1.1 million people could be identified using only four touchpoints, Motherboard reported last year.

Zoom out: Visa spokesperson Andy Gerlt declined to tell Marketing Brew why the company is doing away with Ad Solutions. And just because Visa is shutting down Ad Solutions *does not* mean Visa is out of the data-slinging business, but Gerlt declined to provide details as to what that could look like going forward.—RB