DETERMINING USER SPENDING PROPENSITIES FOR SMART RECOMMENDATIONS

A method may include obtaining, over a network from a financial institution and using login credentials of a user, transactions corresponding to the user, calculating average transaction amounts for merchants based on the transactions, generating a spending propensity score for a category using a harmonic mean of amounts in a subset of the transactions corresponding to the category, generating, for the category, spending match scores between the spending propensity score and the average transaction amounts for the merchants, and recommending a merchant to the user using the spending match scores.