One of the most important resources for any card portfolio manager is understanding cardholders’ spending patterns. This requires not just full access to data, but also the ability to interpret what the data reveals.

Growing business intelligence tools like Card ExpertSM from Fiserv are helping issuers gain deeper insight into their customer base, allowing them to serve cardholders more effectively.

In a PaymentsJournal Podcast, Janine Wilson, Director of Data Solutions at Fiserv, discussed innovative ways financial institutions are now leveraging cardholder data. She was joined by Deana Bartel, Vice President of Payment Services at Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union, and Derek Hayes, Senior Products Manager of Cards and Payments at 1st Source Bank—both of whom are using Card Expert to inform strategy and deliver stronger results.

At the strategic level, cardholder data is essential for understanding not just where clients are transacting, but how they’re transacting—whether through digital wallets, e-commerce, or traditional card-present channels. Insights into spending behaviors and peer benchmarking are critical for assessing issuer performance, Hayes noted.

“At a more granular level, the data allows issuers to build detailed client personas by analyzing variables such as age, available balance, transaction frequency, and preferred shopping channels,” Hayes said. “Questions like whether a client uses a digital wallet or shops online are easily answered.”

“It’s absolutely critical that our clients have access to data and use data to drive their decision making,” said Wilson. “We created Card Expert a number of years ago to address this challenge. This tool takes the mountain of transaction and card usage details that exists and distills it into actionable insights. It’s a single platform containing lots of data around card portfolio performance for our clients, as well as showcasing how their customers interact with and utilize the various card surrounds that support their portfolio.“

Card Expert highlights where banks and credit unions are performing well—and where they have opportunities to improve. This might include reducing time and expenses related to reporting tasks, identifying areas of decline within their portfolios, and engaging specific groups of cardholders to drive actions like activation and usage. Without clear insights into portfolio performance, it’s impossible to make informed decisions or target the right customers with the right offers.

“Card Expert has been an easy and effective way for my team to access that data,” said Bartel. “We’re using that data to improve things like the rate of cardholder declines, driving digital wallet engagement and taking a more proactive approach to personalization versus segmentation when engaging with our cardholders.”

The solution provides an executive-level overview of an issuer’s portfolio while making it easy to drill down into the data. RBFCU uses Card Expert to review declines and identify ways to improve the member experience. It plans to use these insights to send near real-time notifications, allowing members to self-correct without needing to call or switch to another card.

1st Source Bank used Card Expert segmentation tools to analyze clients at different levels, pinpointing those with no or minimal card activity. The data allowed them to design campaigns encouraging these customers to use their card for the first time or increase their usage.

Another campaign focused on expanding digital wallet usage. Card Expert provides visibility into which clients were actively using digital wallets, in turn allowing 1st Source Bank to design campaigns that encouraged clients either to add their card to digital wallets or to increase their usage, ultimately driving both engagement and transaction volume.

“We want to make sure we’re making data-driven decisions,” said Hayes. “We’ve added data from Card Expert’s benchmarking capabilities into data from our core systems and from Mastercard to ensure they get a holistic picture of the customer. The multi-source approach allows us to develop a more comprehensive and targeted strategy.”

Bartel added: “Before moving to Fiserv for our card portfolios and leveraging Card Expert, we rarely used our data in a proactive way because we didn’t have easy access to it. With those limitations, we took a very generic approach to optimizing the portfolio, with lots of generalized campaigns and marketing going out to our cardholders. But we’ve been able to see a shift in how we communicate with our cardholders by leveraging Card Expert, because the data is truly at your fingertips. And one of the things that I love is that it’s continually getting enhancements to make it even more beneficial to my financial institution.”

Fiserv holds monthly sessions to keep its client banks and credit unions connected to ongoing product enhancements. The company answers user-submitted questions live and demonstrates best practices, highlighting tips and tricks for getting the most out of this content. Participants can discuss strategy, how best to use the data, ways to engage members and cardholders, analyze portfolio trends, and benchmark against peers.

“RBFCU is still navigating our data journey, but Card Expert makes it feel like it’s not as daunting of a task for us,” said Bartel. “One key is to define and prioritize your data use cases. Creating those use cases will help you focus on what’s most important to you, and the organizational goals.”

On the horizon for Card Expert is enhanced interchange trends and continued innovation to expand benchmarking beyond today’s debit and credit portfolio metrics. This data will help banks and credit unions see how they stack up against various peer groups, and where they can focus their efforts for growth and improvement.

“We continue to engage with our clients to understand their requirements for expanded capabilities like data sharing or data as a service,” said Wilson, “To ensure that we deliver on the goal of being a partner in data.”