FROM ANONYMOUS TRANSACTIONS TO GOLD DUST: USING PAYMENT CARD FINGERPRINTING FOR A MORE COMPREHENSIVE SINGLE CUSTOMER VIEW
- Justin Lord
- Mar 28
- 4 min read
Anonymous transactions make it harder for retailers to build a complete picture of customer behaviour. Payment card fingerprinting is a clever, privacy-compliant solution that unlocks the value of anonymous customer data. Here’s why.
For omnichannel retailers with physical stores the customer can walk in, buy something, and walk out, often leaving no trace beyond the transaction itself. And those with a large proportion of in-store sales can’t rely purely on their ecommerce customer data because this data subset is not representative of the whole, thereby severely compromising insights.
Many omnichannel retailers with bricks and mortar stores try to close the customer data gap with apps, loyalty schemes, digital receipts and email capture at the point of sale. These tools are great, but they don’t suit every retailer’s business model or budget, nor every customer!
Some shoppers simply don’t want to sign up for yet another app, or loyalty scheme, or share their personal details.
The Value of a Single Customer View
Accurate, complete customer data is gold dust for retailers. A single customer view sits at the very heart of strategies to acquire and retain customers, maximise lifetime values, and minimise churn, as cost-effectively as possible.
The data also powers the algorithms behind RFM (recency, frequency, monetary value), lifetime value, product recommendations, cross- and up-sell opportunities, acquisition, retention and reactivation campaigns and personalised communications.
Clearly, the more data a retailer has about its customers, the more relevant and actionable the insights and the more effective the marketing, product recommendations, and acquisition, retention and reactivation efforts become.
So how can retailers gain a more comprehensive single customer view?
The Power of Card Payment Fingerprinting
Card fingerprinting is a persistent cross-channel identifier that doesn’t require logins, loyalty or app sign-ups. It’s a reliable way to link transactions to the same customer without needing explicit personal data.
Datitude’s managed data platform uses card fingerprint data from the retailer’s payment gateway (such as Adyen and Square) to link multiple in-store transactions to the same customer. Even when the customer remains anonymous.
How it Works in a Nutshell
Transaction Data Collection - Datitude imports and stores transaction data from a retailer’s POS system into the Datitude Platform and assigns each transaction a Customer ID, even if the customer is anonymous.
Card-Fingerprint Data Integration - Datitude ingests card-fingerprint data from the retailer’s payment gateway into the Platform and links it to the relevant transaction.
Persistent Customer ID Creation - When a new transaction comes in with a previously seen card-fingerprint, Datitude matches it to the existing Customer ID rather than generating a new one. The customer may remain anonymous, but their purchase history is now connected.
Why it Matters
1) A Complete Omnichannel Customer View
Payment card fingerprinting enables retailers to stitch together online and offline transaction data and build a richer, more comprehensive view of customer behaviour - even when customers don’t share their personal details.
This data massively enriches customer and marketing analytics (including customer segmentation, RFM analysis, lifetime value calculations) meaning money isn’t being wasted on incomplete and inaccurate data, and marketing spend can be optimised.
2) Seamless Customer Recognition
It is likely that anonymous customers will create an account, sign up for a loyalty programme, or share their email at checkout at some point in the future. At this point, retailers adopting a card fingerprinting approach instantly unlock the customer’s full transaction history, enabling far more effective marketing and personalisation from day one.
Without card fingerprinting, the customer appears as a brand-new customer, with no previous history. It means retailers are starting the customer relationship from scratch - having to build up a purchase history over time to optimise marketing efforts and a higher return on investment.
Managing Data Complexity & Compliance
Implementing card fingerprinting may sound simple but there’s a world of complexity that needs to be carefully managed. Considerations include:
Data integration - retailers will have multiple systems in use, both transactional and non-transactional. While transactional systems will capture payment data, some non-transactional systems may also capture card data (eg. booking / reservation systems) or an email address (eg. store wi-fi). The more data sources that can be integrated the better.
Identity resolution and unification - ingested data needs to be carefully validated, matched, and linked, then merged and de-duplicated to ensure accurate customer profiling.
Data activation - clean, accurate and up-to-date customer data needs to be processed in real-time and flow seamlessly between CDPs, marketing platforms, personalisation engines and analytics tools.
Privacy and compliance – handling data responsibly and securely in line with GDPR and other regulatory compliance is critical, as is transparent data usage and internal data privacy policies. A complete audit trail of which data were collected, when, and from which system is also essential.
Beyond Payment Card Fingerprinting
While payment fingerprinting is a powerful standalone method, it can also work alongside other privacy-compliant techniques to piece together a customer’s footprint without directly collecting personal data. For example:
Device and browser IDs – to link anonymous online sessions
WiFi and in-Store tracking – to understand customer behaviour in-store and footfall patterns.
Why Datitude?
The Datitude integration hub and data platform is a proven solution for implementing card fingerprinting.
The Platform provides the single source of truth for all transactions and customer interactions across all channels and can easily link anonymous transactions to a persistent customer identity.
It enables retailers to unlock the full value of their data, even before customers reveal their identities. When they eventually do, the retailer is armed with a complete transaction history and an even deeper understanding of customer behaviour.
If you’re interested in adopting a payment card fingerprinting approach and turning anonymous transactions into gold dust, contact us today.
About Datitude
We do data! Whatever your data needs, you can trust us to deliver.
Datitude is transforming how businesses connect, integrate, and unify their data. Our award-winning data platform and service provide the unifying framework to enable retailers and brands to get everything they need from their data. Data where it needs to be, on time, in the right format. A true single source of truth. No silos.
Built specifically for omnichannel, Datitude’s managed data platform is proven to deliver and trusted equally by mighty retailers and fast-scaling brands who need better access to their data, and valuable intelligence and actionable insights they can trust.
If you need to get more from your data and deliver more customer-centric experiences, talk to us!