physics

Am I the only one who saw this article on Bloomberg Businessweek about the data mining firm Palantir and its services to JP Morgan Chase, and connects that to the latest Chase shutdowns?

Palantir Knows Everything About You

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/

The way I see it, these first few shutdowns are possibly the wave of the future -- they're just tip-toeing for now, fine tuning some algorithms, seeing how many "good" customers they mistakenly piss off. Give them a little while, they'll set the neural nets into full-on "find churner" mode, and it's adios to all of us.

rebadc

Chase knows who the churners are.
Shutdown your old Marriott card, wait 2 months, open the new Marriott card, your a churner.
Close and open cards to keep within 5/24 and your a churner

Pay off your balances in full every month and your a bad customer.

txflyer77

Occam's Razor.

Why does Chase need Palantir for this when all the data they need is already in their own systems and the credit bureaus?

mia

FALSE. Credit card issuers bundle and sell credit card lines of credit, the same as mortgages, auto loans, etc. Every issuer NEEDS high FICO accounts to blend into their pool of card loans. They are very happy to have us pay in full each month.

Diplomatico

Absolutely. I'm just astounded when I read that people "carry a balance every month" to show they're a "good customer". Foolish.

philemer

My brother thought the same thing. He applies for 1 card maybe every 3 or 4 yrs. He's not foolish just uninformed.

snic

"...Palantir—named after the omniscient crystal balls in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy..."

Sheesh. Palantir were not "omniscient" in Tolkien's book. They were an ancient means of long-distance communication. Tolkien anticipated Skype, not spying tools.

mia

Discussion here about another agency that card issuers use to estimate our demographic characteristics:

Acxiom: an opportunity to see some of the data used to target USA credit card offers.

blitzen

mia

Chase buys miles and points. They are not free. They may be discounted from the retail price that the programs sell miles to consumers, but that's not the relevant metric. We would need to know what Chase pays for miles and points versus their redemption cost for Ultimate Rewards points.

If Chase allows us to redeem a UR point for $0.015 in travel, they very likely pay more than that for an airline mile.

We do know that American Express pays Delta $3+ billion per year for SkyMiles. I expect Chase pays United a similar amount.

blitzen

bgriff

It is not known what the big banks pay for a mile, but I'm not sure I follow your assumption that Chase pays more than 1.5 cents for an airline mile -- especially since Chase has let you transfer to airline miles since back before the CSR existed, when the 1.5 cents toward travel option didn't exist. Paying more than 1.5 cents per airline mile would be disproportionately expensive relative to other UR redemption options for CSP card holders. Why would Chase allow such an expensive redemption relative to other options?

Amex is even clearer -- pretty much every redemption option for MR points indicates that Amex views them as worth about 1 cent each. Why would they then offer mileage transfers that were much more expensive to them than all their other options? Perhaps they think customers find disproportionate value in mileage transfers, but it is odd that every one of the hundreds of other redemption options for MR points is very closely pegged to 1 cent. (It is also possible that Amex's relationship with Delta has other special characteristics, like paying more or less for Delta miles when transferred from MR than when issued via a cobrand card, and/or other kickbacks from Amex to keep Delta happy and retain the cobrand business.)

Of course, it is possible that Amex and Chase have different deals, but both seem to point to the same general area for mileage value.

baroqen

I think it's faulty to assume that just because you get a 1.5 cent redemption on the Chase portal, that automatically translates to the fact that Chase pays more than 1.5 cents per mile. Keep in mind, all of the companies that negotiate huge corporate travel discounts. I'd have a hard time believing that Chase, with their ever larger potential economy of scale, does not do the same.

Case in point, I had a flight booked through my company. When I checked online, the ticket prices were in the $1,100 range, but I know for a fact that my company paid less than $600. I'd assume that Chase has at least an equivalent and probably better corporate rate. Perhaps they're not getting this type of outsized value for all of their bookings, but it certainly reduces the "true"l expense to well below 1.5 cents.

baroqen

Love the analogy, and so true. lol