Subprime Bankcard Growth on the Rise, Reports TransUnion

TransUnion today released research regarding bankcard growth in the U.S. during the last 12 months. Made possible through TransUnion Market Intelligence, the findings indicate that consumers with TransUnion credit scores that place them in the sub-prime risk category opened 16 percent more new accounts between the third quarter 2004 and the third quarter 2005 versus the previous 12-month period. In contrast, consumers in both the super-prime and prime risk categories registered a decline in new account openings of 5.21 percent and 4.58 percent respectively. This announcement was made at the NCDM (National Center for Database Marketing) Winter 2005 Conference in Orlando.

“Information of this type represents just the tip of the iceberg as far as the kind of marketing insight TransUnion can provide marketers,” said Tim Claytor, director of Market Intelligence Solutions for TransUnion. “Through TransUnion Market Intelligence, we give clients the answers they need to understand their best opportunities, make smarter decisions and generate better results.”

TransUnion Market Intelligence applies powerful analytic and data mining tools to individual, household and market level data, allowing marketers to analyze customer specific profiles, competitive peer sets and geography-specific market behavior from current and historical perspectives. Benchmarks derived from the intelligence can be matched against a client’s actual database and direct marketing strategy for a quick gap analysis. Marketers gain immediate access to multi-dimensional profiling that can be effectively matched to current tactics, giving them more lead time to adjust micro and macro marketing strategy.

As today’s research illustrates, bankcard marketers can greatly benefit from knowing which segments of the population are most active in terms of new account openings. With an industry standard response rate of less than one-half of one percent (.4 percent), marketers must apply efficient and effective methods of segmentation to determine which regions and individual prospects to target with a particular offer. By partnering with TransUnion, issuers can analyze the market and their portfolios down to the state, county, Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) or Designated Market Area (DMA) level in order to find the prospects with the greatest likelihood for response.

TransUnion Market Intelligence is powered by the company’s proprietary trend database, which utilizes a random sampling of more than 25 million consumer files. These records are stored anonymously and matched with information from other databases that contain demographic, lifestyle, geographic and life stage data. TransUnion has been collecting quarterly consumer snapshots since 1992 and has access to over one billion consumer observations over time.

“In today’s competitive environment, every marketing dollar counts,” said Claytor. “With TransUnion Market Intelligence, powerful insight is gained into current customer behavior that allows our clients to build a foundation for more successful and cost-effective marketing campaigns.”