IviData

It’s validated.

It is harder to spam. Restaurant owners and competitors can’t manipulate their ratings given the volume of data.

It doesn’t suffer from a sample bias like Yelp does.

Yelp has 27.6 million reviews in its entire history, about 20% of which are spam.

Recommend restaurants based on other restaurants you’ve visited. People who regularly go to Applebee’s might get more chain restaurants, people who eat at fancy places will get more fancy places.

Make recommendations based on budget. Unlike local sites that rely on users to give price ranges, AmEx knows what the typical transactions are.

Tell me what businesses are open on a holiday. It’s Memorial Day and I don’t know what’s open. By collecting and analyzing real-time swipe data, AmEx could tell me where I can go. (Presumably businesses that are swiping transactions are open.)

I’ve asked AmEx executives at various levels for data and the answer is always the same: no.

AmEx also does not currently have SKU-level data.

With SKU-level data, AmEx likely would have allowed the Brookstone charge to go through, knowing that Pan Am cufflinks fit with my profile as an aviation buff.

Large retailers like Amazon are unlikely to share SKU-level data with transaction processors. That data is too valuable. But smaller retailers might. At a much smaller scale, that’s what the small businesses that use Square Register are doing.