Payment processors, networks and other entities create and process large amounts of spending and payment-related data each day. The data is collected and stored to support transaction processing, and other purposes related to ensuring that parties involved in a transaction are properly compensated. The data has other potential uses as well, including for use in identifying and analyzing spending patterns and behaviors. However, when the payment data is used for such analysis purposes, it is important that the transaction details be “de-identified” from any private or personally identifiable information, or that strict limitations on use of and access to the data must be maintained.
It would be desirable to provide systems and methods which allow the analysis of large volumes of transaction data using de-identified data sets. Further, it would be desirable to provide a linkage method between data from one data source (such as a merchant's sales ledger) to transaction data from a second data source (such as a payment network), thereby providing an ability to construct analyses, reports and other applications based on the matched data sets.