Trouble with the bank?

[stevensfo]

That database would be unbelievably massive and costly - and most of the data in it would be of little value to anyone.

Lets put some numbers in. British population, call it 70 million. Transactions per man woman and child per day, one perhaps, but call it 1,000 p.a. How many bytes per transaction. Call it 100. I make that 7 TB. That is a piddling amount of data nowadays. It is still piddling to a big organisation if you multiply it by ten or a hundred. Which is cheaper? A data feed, or a manual process for collecting individual pieces of information?

Nonetheless, that data is mostly not worth much to anyone except marketeers. I have recently started using a Tesco debit card. Tesco knows that I mostly shop in the Asda down the road. That is not very surprising really. Tesco also knows that I spent about £8 in both Boots and Lidl. Tesco has more information about my one shop in Tesco. It knows that I bought four bags of their budget oats. Most shops do not have the technology for collecting that level of information. I do not care who knows that I buy cheap oats. That information does not even help Tesco, because I do not look at their advertising.

Use your Tesco debit card only in Tesco and cash everywhere else. In no time at all, you'll receive vouchers and offers for Tesco. Even better, go to the larger stores where they have facial recognition cameras and spend a lot of time in one section where you really want something. But don't buy!

At check-out, you'll probably receive an offer for X% off anything you buy in that section.


Steve

[GeoffF100]

Use your Tesco debit card only in Tesco and cash everywhere else.

That would defeat the primary object of the card, which is to provide a prepaid card that cannot overdraw* and and has only a small amount of money on it. Lean pickings if it is lost or stolen. The secondary purpose of the card is to provide an emergency debit card if my bank has an outage. Getting Clubcard perks on the rare occasions that I buy something in Tesco is just a bonus.

* Actually it is still possible to take Visa payments on a paper form with no balance check, but that does not appear to be a significant risk.

My local Asda used to have two kiosks for paying for petrol. Then it had one. It is now "pay at the pump" only, so I use my Barclaycard to pay for petrol. If my bank had an outage, I could fund the Tesco card from the Skipton and use it to pay off the Barclaycard, amongst other things.

[stevensfo]

Use your Tesco debit card only in Tesco and cash everywhere else.

That would defeat the primary object of the card, which is to provide a prepaid card that cannot overdraw* and and has only a small amount of money on it. Lean pickings if it is lost or stolen. The secondary purpose of the card is to provide an emergency debit card if my bank has an outage. Getting Clubcard perks on the rare occasions that I buy something in Tesco is just a bonus.

* Actually it is still possible to take Visa payments on a paper form with no balance check, but that does not appear to be a significant risk.

My local Asda used to have two kiosks for paying for petrol. Then it had one. It is now "pay at the pump" only, so I use my Barclaycard to pay for petrol. If my bank had an outage, I could fund the Tesco card from the Skipton and use it to pay off the Barclaycard, amongst other things.

Hi Geoff,

I don't disagree with you at all. Just that my comments were in the context of privacy and data-gathering issues being discussed.

I have quite a few prepaid cards myself, that I fund from my main account. A decision made long ago to introduce diversification into where I keep my hard-earned, as well as diversification of portfolio.

Cash is great. Not easy to overdraw!

Steve