Merchants find it useful to keep track of who their customers are, and how frequently their customers make purchases. Merchants regularly use this information to, for example, administer customer incentives programs, for marketing purposes, and to formulate advertising strategies.
For those customers that make purchases using a financial transaction card (e.g., a credit card, debit card, smart card, etc.), merchants potentially have available to them an easy way of obtaining both identifying and purchase frequency information. Every financial transaction card has stored on it data, such as the customer's personal account number (PAN), which is unique to a particular customer. Such financial transaction card data is extracted from the card and sent to the merchant during the course of a typical card-based transaction. Merchants could store that unique financial transaction card data, and use it to determine each time a purchase was made by a customer using a particular financial transaction card.
However, merchants are currently unable to make use of financial transaction card data to keep track of customers and purchase frequency. For security reasons, current payment schemes for financial transaction cards have dictated rules that forbid merchants from storing financial transaction card data that contains information about a customer's account. There remains a need in the art for a simple method and system that would allow merchants to uniquely identify their customers using financial transaction card data, but that does not require that the merchants store that data.