Credit card issuers and retail banks use customer transaction data to improve targeting of cross-sell offers.

Customer transactions were 296 million for the fourth quarter, up 3.1 per cent from a year ago.

It handles 12m customer transactions a month, dispensing 5 billion of cash a year.

The service- vital for any web-based business - authorises customer transactions, collects payments and transfers the money into the company's bank account.

This was much stronger than the 0.4 per cent growth in the previous quarter and came after it recorded 10 million more customer transactions than a year earlier.