If, in the new age of advertising, marketers will only pay for ads that produce a verified sale, that could give banks a front-row seat.

After all, it is the banks which have full sight of what their customers are actually buying.

That’s the space in which Cardlytics is operating. The eight-year-old, Atlanta-based company is using its network of banks, comprising 120mn accounts, to help advertisers verify purchase and target known customer behaviors.

“Our data answers the question, ‘Did spend occur?’,” says Cardlytics TV partnerships SVP Chris Harter in this panel debate convened by Beet.TV. “When a TV customer was served an ad campaign, did they or did they not buy something?”

But Cardlytics can support more than just identifying confirmed purchases after campaigns run. Bank account data is also a treasure trove of insight with which to target ads firstly.

“We can connect a DISH household ID to a bank ID,” Harter adds. “You can say, ‘We want to reach burger buyers’, or ‘We just want to target somebody at the merchant level’.

“We believe that connection of first-party bank data to set-top box data, that’s where the real power is.”

If vendors like Cardlytics can leverage that treasure trove in a privacy-compliant way, the banks could become more powerful than ever and gain a new place at the ad-tech table.

The panel was interviewed by MediaMath CMO Joanna O’Connell.

This video was produced at the Beet.TV leadership summit in New York on cross-platform addressability on July 26.  The event and the series is presented by DISH Media Sales and Experian Marketing Services.  Please visit this page to find addition videos from the summit.