Credit Business

In order to provide greater insight into economic trends and consumer habits, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has announced plans to monitor up to four out of five credit card transactions over the next twelve months. It will gather this information through a controversial data-mining program that has been in place for several months.

Data suggests that more than one billion credit cards were used in 2012 and amounted to a total number of 53 billion transactions. This means that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will seek to monitor more than 40 billion transactions from more than 900 billion credit cards this year.

This announcement has created much discussion and debate throughout the industry and in the halls of Congress. Several Congressional representatives