Credit Card Industry Scrambles as Consumers Turn to AI for Card Advice

After years of relying on keyword-dominated search results as the golden goose for customer acquisition, the payments industry is scrambling to catch up as many potential cardholders turn to AI tools for advice on picking their next credit cards. 

“Even the top experts in the field don’t truly understand how AI is impacting the financial marketing environment now,” event founder Jason Steele told us at this year’s CardCon where credit card marketers, publishers, and affiliate industry professionals arrived in full force to learn from one another, close deals, and talk all things large language model (LLM).

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“The industry is shifting their strategy to accommodate consumers, because that’s all you can do,” Steele said. “The consumers are always in charge.”

We spoke with a slew of industry experts on the main stage in Phoenix and got their takes on credit card marketing in the age of AI from CardCon 2026. They offered views of what’s changing and what comes next in the world of AI and credit card marketing.

The bottom line: Speakers said the traditional path to choosing a credit card has changed, and the industry is quickly adapting with big dollars on the line. Let’s begin by looking at what consumers are demanding of Al.

“I think consumers generally are seeing AI engines, whether it be Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT, as a different way of being able to sort and find information,” Nicky Senyard, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Fintel Connect, told us.

“So of course that’s going to impact financial services because people are always looking at ways of optimizing their own financial products.”

And with AI, the answers come fast. 

“What the AI interfaces are doing are just getting consumers another channel to find this information, probably a little smarter, a little more quickly,” Senyard said.

“I think affiliates have always been on the cutting edge of being able to capitalize on digital expansion, and that’s what AI has done. … Affiliates and publishers are learning that AI is ingesting information and giving them what they’re looking for,” Senyard said. 

She advises publishers and credit card marketers to “develop content that is AI platform ingestible” and to approach AI in two different ways.

“If you’re doing your own AI optimization and you’re working with publishers on an AI strategy then you’re actually getting the best of both worlds,” Senyard said.

Julia Altmann, Content Team Lead at Natural Intelligence which owns the personal finance marketplace site BestMoney, told us AI overviews like those in Google search results are playing a key role in how consumers are discovering credit cards and other financial services products.

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She emphasized that publishers need to prioritize AI in their marketing strategies. 

“Increasing AI visibility is super important. So it’s not just about having an excellent user experience on our site. It’s also about having an excellent user experience via AI,” Altmann said. 

“As much as people are using AI right now … in an informational way, I think eventually it will come down to making a decision via AI,” Altmann said. 

“I think a lot more decision-making will be taking place within AI platforms versus visiting on different sites, and it’s up to companies like mine and other companies to really take advantage of that possible landscape.”

As Katya Nieberg-Wheeler, Executive Director of Business Development and Client Strategy at Deluxe, told us, timing is a key part of personalization when reaching out to credit card customers.

“It’s not only the right offer, it’s not only the right message, it’s also the right time,” Nieberg-Wheeler told us. 

“We also have the ability to deliver it on a daily or weekly basis. And so that becomes the hyper-personalization, not only in the fact that you’re offering something that they might need, but they need it now. You’re there for them.”

Christopher McFarland, SVP of Growth in Financial Services at credit card affiliate marketing firm CJ, told us that consumers want products that align with their values. 

 “A demand that’s coming from consumers right now, they want the products that they have in their lives that exist in that top-of-wallet space to also subtly, if not directly, reflect their values,” McFarland told us. 

“From an LLM perspective … ensuring that the content that you’re crafting in that sort of core affiliate path is optimized for two different audiences, the human audience that’s reading it, and the AI engine and the large language models that are consuming that content to create those summaries,” McFarland said.

“When all of those things are aligned, you are fully competitive and you have a strategy that can win.”

As consumers turn to AI for personal finance decisions, including choosing credit cards, the credit card marketing industry is evolving to keep up. AI visibility is emphasized as a priority with AI now suggesting personal finance products to users.  

Beyond AI, personalization is another key trend. Consumers want credit cards and financial products that meet their needs and align with their values. And it’s up to credit card issuers and publishers to deliver.