The Fight Between Card Brands, Payment Card Comparison Sites Getting Rough

There is a natural love-hate relationship between payment card comparison sites and the card brands they compare, with the brands wanting to appear in the sites—which typically offer application forms for those cards—but to also control how things are phrased. Complicating this relationship is that many of those brands are advertisers on those sites.

Brands have leveraged their various carrots—especially advertising investments, which are often the main and sometimes only revenue these sites have—as well as sticks—including lawsuits, yanking those ad dollars and trying to prevent the sites from mentioning their products at all—to control the sites. Sometimes the sites push back, but more often they roll.

The Wall Street Journal, in a story exploring this struggle, documented quite a few examples. “When Curtis Arnold launched the card-comparison website BestPrepaidDebitCards.com in early 2013, American Express signed on as an early advertiser. Soon after, Mr. Arnold said, the company asked him to refer to its widely used Bluebird card not as a prepaid card but as a ‘checking and debit alternative.’ Mr. Arnold agreed. Then, last summer, American Express executives urged the site to change how it presented the card’s fees, he said. ‘We cracked,’ said Mr. Arnold. ‘I’d be lying to say their input didn’t play a role. If we’re consumer-driven, we shouldn’t be yielding to any advertiser demands.'”

The core of the debate depends on perspective and point-of-view. The brands paint these change requests as fixing inaccuracies and making sure that consumers are being given apples-to-apples comparisons, which can be tricky with payment card options. And the sites say that the change requests are the opposite, attempts to slant the comparison copy in their favor, potentially misleading consumers.

” Interviews with a dozen card-comparison sites reveal that as card-issuer pressure ramps up—with increased requests for sites to delete or change some information—most sites are giving in to their demands. At stake for consumers is potentially misleading and less complete information,” the Journal reported. “Consumers consult credit- and prepaid-card comparison websites to find the cards with the lowest fees and the best rewards programs. Instead, they’re increasingly seeing the fees lenders want the sites to show rather than the fees they’re likely to incur. And as lenders cut off ties, some no longer want their cards shown on these sites at all.”

And yes, the government may get involved. “Lenders say the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has expressed concern about the banks’ relationships with the third-party credit-card sites. ‘The Bureau is aware of these websites and will continue to look closely at how credit cards are marketed [on these sites] to monitor for consumer harm,’ a CFPB spokesperson told the Journal.