Synchrony Financial, the nation’s largest provider of private-label lending programs, will start providing its clients with deep Apple Pay transaction data.
Synchrony appears to be the first issuer that is providing bank-level Apple Pay data to third parties.
Synchrony, formed from GE Capital’s private label unit, had $61.4 billion of outstanding receivables at the end of last quarter, a 12% increase over the same quarter in 2014.
For its part, Synchrony is not releasing much information about its Apple Pay data program. In its earnings call earlier this week, Synchrony President and CEO Margaret Keane said that the company had “implemented a solution that will provide us and our retailers, access to the same level of data on transactions that go through Apple Pay.”
The company would not go into specifics about the exact “data on transactions” that it was providing. Keane said that Synchrony has “been working hard to ensure that the key benefits cardholders enjoy and the data our partners need are retained when transactions move to mobile devices.” She added, “The big question with enabling private-label credit cards and Apple Pay has been around whether the capture of valuable transaction data would still occur.”
Driven by the rapid growth in mobile shopping, the company has apparently figured out how to capture and provide that data. The company declined to say whether it has made a deal with Apple to provide the data.
It appears that Synchrony’s data sharing will start with JC Penny, its first private-label payments client to adopt Synchrony’s Apple Pay offering.
What seems to be happening here is that, as a bank, Synchrony has access to “the whole data stream” from Apple. In fact, the banks offering Apple Pay reportedly have the right and permission to share that data with their third parties, which are saddled with the same security and privacy conditions as the issuer and must be a party to the transactions. But while all the Apple Pay banks have the right to share the information, only Synchrony has said that it will. Of course, Synchrony, as a vassel of its clients, is under significant pressure to deliver to them transaction-level data.
Green Dot and American Express are two examples of banks that might choose to share Apple Pay data with third parties. But there is little chance these arrangements will be flaunted — Apple doesn’t want to be seen as feeding the financial services sector with data on consumers’ spending practices.
Synchrony [ticker: SYF] today has a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion.