Too Sensitive to Share? Working with Consumers’ Credit Card Transactions

Simply by paying with credit cards, consumers spend more than they would with cash due a difference in payment transparency. We introduced a mobile application to test the efficacy of personalized feedback interventions to help people save money by lowering credit card expenses, and ultimately, to guide them towards a more responsibly use of digital forms of payment. For our large-scale field study (N>1’000 individuals), we cooperated with a credit card issuer to be able to test the effectiveness of our mobile-mediated interventions on real-world credit card transactions over a period of three months. This paper summarizes the main challenges we encountered, and the taken measures that enabled us to leverage highly sensitive data for research, which serve as guidelines for future industry-facing field studies.