e and spending in Australia. The multinational financial giant has drawn on aggregated and anonymous transaction data, along with other payments forms including cash, which have analysed to offer insight into consumer spending trends. The report aims to provide an early overview of market indices to help retailers, amongst others, in their decision-making processes. “One of our clients is the Australian Tourism board and we were able to show them there’s a drop in spending from China, much more dramatic than they were expecting,” said Quinlan. “Most of the marketing dollars have been aimed at the Chinese market rather than at the US, who are actually the number one spenders out here in Australia, with the UK at number two.   “Things like that you have to catch early, otherwise you can do all the marketing you want towards China, but they’re not coming unfortunately, and that’s an issue.” The largest Australian retailers should “learn to market to the people coming in” to the country, according to Quinlan, who asserts that a key lesson derived from global analysis is people don’t, “have time in their lives”. “There’s now two people in a family working all the time; we are actually seeing when they go on vacation they actually do what we call destination shopping,” she said. “So they actually shop for clothes – and normal clothes that they could buy at home they buy abroad because they actually have time to do it.” Quinlan expects the current trend in the US of consumers choosing to “shop small” to soon take over the Australian market. “Small businesses have outgrown total retail sales,” said Quinlan. “The American consumer is choosing to shop small, and I think that what’s going to happen, and revive the Australian spending, is that people want to look unique. The entrepreneurial spirit is very much what will drive the experiential economy. You’ll find a café sitting in a bookstore, that type of mixture where you see uplift in spending. These are actionable insights.” Retailers can make better merchandising decisions based on the data in the report, according to Quinlan. “I keep urging retailers to stop discounting and think more about the merchandise side,” said Quinlan. “How much do I have in my store? How much do I need to order? I’d rather preserve margins by running out of stock.” Mastercard has 2000 data scientists who examine 160 million transactions every hour, to which 1.5 million rules and algorithms are applied to culminate in accurate findings pertinent to total retail spend, including cash and cheque. Quinlan says that the report is aimed at helping retailers benchmark themselves against each other. “They know what’s going on in their business, but they don’t know what other people are doing in their sector. And one of the things that’s happened in retail globally, is that a lot of company’s are privately held and not publicly traded on stock exchanges, therefore nobody has any idea what the sales are because they’re not required to report them. “But we see everybody – we don’t care if you’re public or private. So in that regard we are able to really give a very accurate view of the sector so people can look at it in a relevant way and see how well they are doing.” Mastercard’s SpendingPulse report has been published for 13 years in Brazil, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, the UK and US. Want more Inside Retail? Subscribe to Inside Retail Weekly now and get our premium print publication delivered to your door every week.