Our Services

Close X
Challenge

A major US bank lacked competitive insight about initial credit line assignment strategy within their credit card portfolio.   

Solution

By participation in the Credit Card Payments Study (CCPS) Argus provided the bank with external visibility on their performance relative to both the industry overall and a group of the bank’s peers.  The CCPS benchmark reports included key metrics on portfolio performance and profitability, encompassing: balance transfers, credit lines, rewards, fees, payment amounts, payment patterns, yield, pricing, transaction mix, and more. 

Results

By leveraging CCPS, the bank learned that their initial credit line assignment was below the benchmark across all risk bands.  They saw 25% lower spending on their credit card relative to the benchmark.  These insights prompted an adjustment to their initial credit line assignment strategies for specific segments, resulting in a 15% increase in spending and a 10% increase in balances in these segments.


In today’s competitive market, the credit card banking environment is highly complex and rapidly changing due to the effects of the recession as well as stricter regulations put forward by the Credit CARD Act of 2009. In order to succeed, issuers need new tools to accurately measure their profitability and to understand their performance relative to their competition. 

In order to satisfy issuers’ requirements for accurate, credible, and relevant benchmarking information, Argus launched the Credit Card Payments Study (CCPS) in 1997, the industry-wide panel focused on account and transaction detail for virtually every US consumer credit card. Because the cards of all issuers are linked together into depersonalized customer “wallets,” the CCPS can provide comprehensive insight into an issuer’s customers’ payments behavior both “on us” and “off us.” CCPS is the leading source of accurate competitor benchmarking information on consumer credit card payments activity.

Argus’s benchmarking data makes it possible to evaluate an issuer’s programs relative to customized benchmarks of similar programs. Issuers are able to compare their portfolios to peers on many dimensions across the customer lifecycle, including:

  • The competitive positioning of new account pricing, line assignment, and promotional offer usage
  • Ongoing line management strategies, including line assignment by risk score band, line increases and decreases, and utilization
  • Strategies for balance generation, including the use of promotional rates among mature customers, spending generation, balance transfer and cash advance activity, and payment behavior
  • Fee assessment practices, including the strictness of punitive fee assessment, average fee amounts, and waiver rates
  • Risk management performance, including account- and asset-level roll rates, balance control ratios, payment behavior, and charge-off performance.