The extremely competitive market for Private Label Credit Cards is undergoing a transformation due to the effects of the recession as well as stricter regulations put forward by the Credit CARD Act of 2009. These challenges have caused some issuers to sell their Private Label portfolios and others to seek alternative ways to impact their bottom line.
Given the unique nature of Private Label credit card portfolios, in 2009 Argus partnered with multiple card issuers to create a study that specifically focuses on issuers’ Private Label card portfolios. In less than 2 years time, this study has become the most comprehensive source of private label information across the industry.
Participants use Argus’s benchmarking data to evaluate their 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 underwriting strategies, pricing, line assignment, and promotional offer usage (life of loan, with pay and without pay promotional financing, etc)
- Ongoing line management strategies, including line assignment by risk score band, line increases and decreases, and utilization dynamics
- Strategies to counter “one and done” card activity, including use of promotional rates among mature customers, spend generation initiatives, and promotional 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.
Participants benefit by:
- Gaining a detailed understanding through comparisons of issuer performance relative to peers for specific risk, vintage, and product segments
- Obtaining insights to facilitate action against a variety of opportunities, yielding improvements in performance and profitability that represent substantial return on investment in the study
- Having access to over two years of private label behavior across participants allows issuers to gain insights by leveraging Argus for ad hoc analytic support
- Utilizing Argus’s staff of experts who have decades of experience in the US Credit Card industry