Credit card companies are pulling out all the stops to give customers more tools to manage and ultimately reduce their debt, and Discover’s no exception.
The card company is deploying “Spend Analyzer,” which helps customers understand their spending habits by providing a visual representation of their Discover card purchases through charts that organize buys into categories such as travel, supermarkets and gas. The tool also allows a deeper dive into comparing spending behavior over time, displays up to two years of account activity and can give a visual picture of a consumer’s average and total number of transactions per month.
Mike Boush, a vp at Discover Card, says the new product was introduced after customer research, and is not a response to increased consumer debt resulting from the recession. “Our customers said they wanted to be able to monitor spending and keep control of their finances,” he says. “We wanted to make sure that you got an at-a-glance summary and be able to drill down into sub categories.”
With a variety of rollouts over the past couple of months, card companies have attempted to give users a more detailed picture of how and where they are spending. Both MasterCard and Visa have recently introduced products that track activity and allow users to choose favored merchant categories to receive tailored marketing offers.
