The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has initiated an investigation into several major companies regarding their use of customer data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence for personalized pricing strategies.
Eight companies from various sectors — including Mastercard, JPMorgan Chase, Accenture, Task Software, McKinsey & Co., Revionics, Bloomreach, and Pros — have received information requests from the FTC. The agency is seeking insights into how these pricing methods affect privacy, competition, and consumer protection.
These firms utilize data tools in a practice known as “surveillance pricing” or “dynamic pricing,” which allows them to present different prices to different consumers based on factors such as location, demographics, credit history, and browsing or shopping behaviors.
Many of the companies involved in the investigation provide transaction, sales, and pricing services to some of the largest businesses both in the U.S. and internationally. Task Software is known for its role in transaction management for major hospitality brands like McDonald’s and Starbucks. Revionics offers retail price optimization software and pricing analytics utilized by global retailers, including Home Depot. Pros, which specializes in AI-powered pricing solutions, counts clients such as Nestlé, HP, and United Airlines, and is also a technology development partner of Microsoft.
The FTC aims to clarify this “opaque market” that segments shoppers and establishes targeted pricing for various products and services.
FTC Chair Lina Khan remarked, “Firms that harvest Americans’ personal data can put people’s privacy at risk. Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices. Americans deserve to know whether businesses are using detailed consumer data to deploy surveillance pricing, and the FTC’s inquiry will shed light on this shadowy ecosystem of pricing middlemen.”
The commission is focused on four main areas: the types of surveillance pricing products and services each company provides, their data collection methods, customer and sales information, and the influence of these practices on the prices consumers ultimately pay.