Richi Jennings from Ferris Research, who has an eye for the interesting and the quirky, offers this tidbit in an e-mail newsletter that arrived here this morning:
“If a credit card company were to send statements by e-mail, it might be able to identify which customers are getting into financial difficulties,” Jennings writes. “That’s the interesting claim made by e-mail encryption company Identum.“
“The argument goes like this: When card issuers send paper statements to people, they’re usually opened quickly. However, when people are getting into financial trouble, they often go into denial. This causes them to ignore card statements, putting them in a pile somewhere, unopened.”
“What if the card issuer had some way of knowing that statements were going unread? That would be an early warning that there’s a problem.
Interesting theory, all right, but wouldn’t a clearer and earlier sign of debt trouble be a ballooning balance and/or unpaid minimums? And the card companies don’t need to rely on a reading of the e-mail tealeaves to glean that kind of info.
Identum might be reaching a bit to sell this particular feature.
