Media companies have another rival for ad dollars: JPMorgan Chase. One of America’s largest Wall Street players announced that it’s launched Chase Media Solutions, a bank-led media business that promises to connect brands with the financial institution’s 80 million customers—a number about equal to the New York Times’s total digital traffic numbers for the month of February, or around 10 times the combined subscriber base of Time, Vogue, People, GQ, Travel + Leisure, and Golf Digest.

The platform joins a burgeoning category of other so-called retail media networks—Walmart Connect, Target’s Roundel, Home Depot Retail Media+—that offer advertising and cross-promotional opportunities to outside brands. Only instead of finding patterns in the items placed in consumers’ digital shopping carts, Chase can mine customers’ account transactions for spending habits across theoretically any industry (legal ones, anyway). The company tells Fast Company this is win-win for both customers and brands because advertisers can offer customers products and services that they have a clear documented interest in.

For instance, pet food discounts to frequent pet store shoppers. Or a more concrete example: an airline targeting travelers who hadn’t flown with it before. Here, Chase could eliminate accountholders with previous purchase histories, then send an attractive cash-back offer to everyone else. That was actually a real-world example, the bank said (the platform was in beta for several months). In a 30-day campaign, Air Canada added almost 10,000 new customers who spent $2.3 million.

If those returns seem worrisome for media companies, there is another group that may have more reason to sweat them: the social networks that gutted traditional advertising channels by moving away from the old one-size-fits-all approach.

By now, the social networks are all aware of how their disruptive billion-dollar ad platforms have become a liability for brand safety. Since Elon Musk took it over, X (formerly Twitter), has become a content free-for-all, to the point where ads for Adobe and the University of Maryland’s football team have appeared next to pro-Nazi posts. Last November, internal documents showed X reportedly at risk of hemorrhaging $75 million worth of revenue by year-end after IBM, Apple, Disney, and other big companies pulled ads. Facebook saw a similar revolt in 2020, when a boycott over its handling of misinformation and hate speech caused more than 1,000 brands to halt ad spending.

But Chase doesn’t need to worry about companies paying for ad placement that ends up adjacent to hate speech, disinformation, or fake-AI content. Customers see the ads directly on the website or Chase app; a worst-case scenario is maybe they appear near a high-APR credit card offer. The company notes that, in a practice common for retail media networks but not necessarily social platforms, brands also don’t pay until a purchase is made.

Chase additionally stressed to Fast Company that in a world where people can no longer predict what tech actors will do with their personal data (whether Meta shared users’ DMs with Netflix is the newest scandal du jour), Chase cannot share personal data because it’s a bank tightly regulated by the federal government in ways that the tech giants Meta, Netflix, Apple, and TikTok have fought, successfully so far, to be free from.

Transaction histories stay walled off “within the bank’s highly secure environment” just like they are for would-be hackers, Rich Muhlstock, president of Chase Media Solutions, tells Fast Company. “We do not share customers’ personally identifiable information or financial data with brands, merchants, or anyone. Our platform is built on the foundational trust and institutional credibility of Chase, including a verified audience and brand-safe-owned channels.”

Chase also says the platform has plenty of room to grow. In fact, the company has been on a mini media-buying spree of its own recently. It purchased food website The Infatuation and restaurant guide Zagat in 2021. Its travel-agency arm, meanwhile, has been diversifying lately too, acquiring CxLoyalty in 2021 and Frosch Travel Group in 2022. In a perfect future, Chase said, it’s possible spending data could reveal a customer has upcoming plans to ski in Colorado. This person might receive offers for The Infatuation’s best restaurants located in Denver, where their flight lands, alongside deals for a winter jacket or ski goggles placed by another retailer like, say, REI.