They're also going to be selling off real-time feeds of per-company sales data to investors:

MasterCard has launched a new product for investors leveraging its huge global panel of transaction data from over 1.7B cards. This panel is global, more representative, more timely (weekly data to get ahead of monthly comps) and more customizable than any other transactional database available to the buy-side.

There is a broad range of topics on which we can provide investors with timely insights with actual sales transactions. Here are just a few samples of the topics we have done work.

• Detailed Macro reads across 14 sectors in the US and 4 in the UK

      •         Department Stores – Total sales, transactions and Avg Basket size across segments


      •         Office Supply Stores – Total sales, transactions and Avg Basket size for ODP, OMX and SPLS


      •         Home Improvement – Total sales, transactions and Avg Basket size for HD, LOW, LL and Ace


      •         Consumer Electronics – Total Sales, Transactions segmented by price point (e.g. to get a read on flat-panel/laptop sales)


      •         Other Retailers across a broad range of segments – Total Sales and Transactions


      •         Grocery stores – Total sales, transactions and Avg Basket size


      •         E-Commerce—Segmenting direct v. store sales trends, analysis of e-commerce companies like AMZN, NILE and many others


      •         Hotels – direct vs. OTA bookings/international trends, highly correlative chain hotels RevPar, Vegas-specific hotels


      •         Airlines – forward looking bookings as an indicator of RASM


      •         Cable/Satellite – ARPU, Churn and Total sales