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, derive performance standards, articulate profitability goals and generate concrete detailed roadmaps to achieve these goals.

The CardProfit profitability methodology has been applied to more than 70 banks in the Americas and has resulted in profitability increases from 30% to 90%. Profitability cannot be measured from transactional processing volume alone. CardProfit dispels the notion of profitability as a retrospective monolithic accounting concept and applies it instead at the unit level as the core of a proactive forward strategy driving the future of the business. The need to look at profitability is ever more pressing in this global economy, as it is true in the U.S., in light of the new Credit Card Act of 2009.

CardProfit brings to the credit card and payments industry a new dynamic vison of the business, by providing previously unavailable capabilities for the analysis, visualization and understanding of profitability, financial performance, and other market differentiators, in order to progressively support bank management in strategic decision making and results measurement.

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.

CardProfit can be used to divide the market multi-dimensionally according to separate hierarchical segmentations. For example, we can 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. Cross-referenced segmentation can bring about the most effective isolation of the most differentiable tendencies in the market and in the bank's performance. With thousands of segment intersections, can we mine for segments with specific characteristics? which are the best and worst performing segment intersections? In the Issuer business, for example, can we compare "the profitability of Classic Card in the socioeconomic stratum A of each geographic region in a given country"?.

CardProfit can apply regional or international benchmarks to the measurement of profitability and performance. It can also generate comprehensive suites of internal benchmarks, including benchmarks for the entire business or particular segments, benchmarks for best, average or worst performance, all-time historical benchmarks, cyclic historic benchmarks, etc. These benchmarks can be used with existing or projected volumes to establish performance goals.

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, risk-management, CRM, and operations. CardProfit offers executive perspectives which are consolidated perspectives across multiple lines of businesses.

With respect to the credit card Issuer and Acquirer lines of businesses, CardProfit manages more than 1,100 different primary variables which are specific to such businesses. CardProfit can be started effectively with 25 variables from each business line and gradually extended as justified by the added benefit of additional measurements. 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.

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.

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.