A monthly charge!
That’s right! American Express trained its computer systems to recognize patterns in my spending habits. This likely has taken years and millions of dollars of programming. It also likely took a change in regulatory permissions for the company to cross over from “just” storing my transaction data to running programs against it to develop important insights on behalf of its customers.
In other words, this is likely an important strategic effort for American Express to continue to justify the relatively high cost for both consumers and merchants to continue working with the company. But the idea is really sexy and interesting, that somehow the company can give me valuable predictive insights into my spending and help me be, what?, more aware or effective in my spending?
It was with great anticipation that I opened an email from Amex this morning, titled “Predicted Monthly Charges”. And the result is… Amex was able to predict that they expect one charge of $3.99, from Pandora in the next 30 days. This is truly astonishing, particularly since I have been paying $3.99 per month to Pandora, for what?, at leas the last 5 years.
My amazement at this report caused me to look back in my email to see if I had missed previous reports from Amex. It turns out this is the fifth such report I’ve got from Amex, the last two of which reported exactly the same monthly charge! (And I apologize to the company if I’ve had more but the others have been removed from email, over which I have very little control anymore, way less than Hillary Clinton.)
The prior two, delivered respectively in November, 2015 and January, 2016 did indeed list a number of recurring charges (Beats Music, Hulu, Nest, Netflix), but also others that I didn’t recognize. If I had been looking at these reports, I would have been motivated both to review why I was still paying Beats or Hulu but also to investigate the charges I didn’t recognize as recurring. Now I am motivated, but these reports are more than 8 months old! And the recent ones tell me something I already know and don’t need to review.
What happened? Did Amex computers get dumber? Amex people feel less adventurous? I really can’t wait for the future where computers help me be a better consumer, but it does seem like I am still waiting for that future.