>It is believed by many that banks make lots of money selling "your data." This is not a significant contributor to the economics of credit cards, for reasons which are slightly too complicated to get into in this piece. The short version: much like Google and Facebook, issuers can demonstrate to the most sophisticated organizations on the planet that they can deterministically influence actual purchasing behavior. That's easier to sell than a CSV file and worth more to more businesses.

What did you mean by this? I get that raw customer transaction data might not be as valuable as one would think, but you seem to suggest that there is another thing they do with the data that DOES make money. Can you elaborate?