Cardprofit is a strategic business intelligence software application to measure profitability and other differentiators of credit card and payments products in multi-dimensional segmented markets. CardProfit brings to the banking industry a new dynamic vision of the credit card and payments business, by providing previously unavailable capabilities for the analysis, visualization and dissection of profitability, financial performance, and other market differentiators, in order to progressively support bank management in strategic decision making and results measurement.

It is well recognized throughout the global payments industry, that there is an absence of instruments to measure segment profitability for specific credit card and payments products and other arbitrary forms of market segmentation. This absence causes significant losses by impairing the visualization of deficient areas and their subsequent corrective measures, and by depriving the business from mechanisms to identify new market opportunities. These needs are further accentuated in today's market where heterogeneous credit card products are specialized to serve diversified market niches or even separate regions or countries under a single corporate umbrella. CardProfit has been designed and developed to respond to these needs and maximize the visualization and differentiation of profitability in the credit card and payments business, and serve as the mechanism for the integration and unification of credit card business intelligence in these naturally segmented markets.

CardProfit proposes a fundamental paradigm shift from a general emphasis centered around credit card balance and billing augmentation, to a competitive emphasis based on the profitability of the businesses' segments (e.g. credit card products and merchants), measuring net performance at the segment level, thus converting such segments in a key factor to the bank's success.

With our emphasis on market segmentation, we can now ask these questions: Can we divide our market multi-dimensionally according to separate independent segmentations? For example, can we simultaneously segment the issuer market by credit card product, product type, geographical region, age groups, income, payment habits, transactional volume, marketing campaign account harvests, etc., so that profitability and other differentiators can be isolated? Can we intersect or cross-reference the segments from these segmentation dimensions to further differentiate their performance? With thousands of segment intersections, can we mine for segments with specific characteristics? which are the best and worst performing segment intersections? Consider, for example, that the segment intersection of GoldCard holders aged 25 - 35, with income bracket B, with a minimum monthly payment habit, and who live in the Valley View county, is the best net performing intersection. What are the largest enclosing cross-sectional segments in our market, which statistically share that performance? In other words, does this performance level apply only to this segment intersection or does it extend in any direction at all, for example, to all other credit card products in that intersection besides GoldCard, or to all age groups, or to a wider geographical region, or to all minimum payment cardholders in the intersection?

CardProfit is an application for the profitability measurement of multiple lines of business. Consumer Banking, for example, typically contains separate lines of business such as Credit Card Issuer, Credit Card Acquirer, Mortgage Loans, Auto Loans, Corporate Lending, PYMES, etc. Each line of business can be visualized simultaneously through multiple hierarchical market segmentations, designed and customized for each bank. For example, the classic way of segmenting the Issuer business is by credit card brand and product (which includes co-branded and private label credit cards), but in addition, the Issuer business can be segmented by credit card type or purpose, by geographic region, cardholder socioeconomic strata, cardholder transactional volume, or by "acquisition harvests" (i.e. the grouping of accounts according to the marketing campaign that captured them), etc. Each line of business can also be visualized through cross-referenced segmentations or intersections among segments from different segmentations. The cross-cutting or dissection resulting from this cross-referencing segmentations brings about the most effective isolation of the most differentiable tendencies in the market. In the Issuer business, for example, cross-referenced segmentation will allow the comparison of "the profitability of Visa Classic in the socioeconomic stratum A of each geographic region in a given country". A line of business can be managed from different perspectives, where each offers a particular analytical emphasis. The main perspective supported is profitability, but other perspectives include marketing, CRM, operations and accounting. CardProfit offers executive perspectives which are consolidated perspectives across multiple lines of businesses.

Any of the variables and indicators in these models can be visualized dynamically throughout its historic periods, at any level of frequency or periodic granularity, and comparatively against itself or other variables or indicators in the model. CardProfit can be configured for any currency and world region or locale. Although initially configured for English and Spanish, it can be easily configured for any other language. eKnowlogie based its Issuer and Acquirer profitability models on the methodologies developed by Global Payments, the banking consulting company with an exclusive emphasis on credit card profitability and the most prominent in Latin America.

With respect to the credit card Issuer and Acquirer businesses, CardProfit manages more than 1,100 different primary variables which are specific to such businesses. CardProfit produces profitability and performance indicators by product or by any other arbitrary user-defined market segments, as well as operational figures and indicators of natural expenses and productivity specific to the functional areas of the Issuer and Acquirer businesses.

CardProfit offers high-level executive perspectives displayed as dashboards that allow the consolidated visualization of global indicators, or the entire Consumer Banking portfolio or the credit card businesses, as well as detailed panels capable of controlling the analysis and supporting the visualization of each of the more than 1,100 variables from the credit card businesses alone. Be that in executive perspective dashboards or detailed panels, segments can be ranked with respect to strategic global indicators or to any of the businesses variables or indicators.

CardProfit's multidimensional market segmentation is uniquely suitable for CRM analysis, because it allows the evaluation of CRM segments from the profitability perspective. CRM tools for the credit card and payments industry do not support profitability measurement, rendering them unable to classify segments by their impact on the profitability of the business. This suggests that market segmentation for profitability measurement and CRM are inseparable, given that in order to carry out CRM impact studies on the bottom line, it is necessary that such a study be supported with a profitability and financial performance infrastrusture.