Tracking Heterogeneous Spending Patterns with Credit Card Microdata

Timely and granular spending data are essential for understanding turning points in the economy. In this paper, we introduce a measure of account-level credit card spending, constructed using microdata on credit card balances and payments from TransUnion’s anonymized credit bureau database. Our measure is available at a higher frequency and with much greater granularity than other metrics: we capture monthly spending for approximately 80% of adults in Canada with the potential to view changes in the economy with a lag of less than one month, and can disaggregate spending by age, geographic location and credit history. When linked to the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions’ real estate secured lending database, we can further examine spending by regulatory mortgage underwriting characteristics, supporting agile monitoring of granular spending dynamics.