Big Data Not Just for Customer Insights

Over the last couple of years, Big Data has become a huge buzzword in the business world. Whether this data comes from social networks, purchase histories, Web browsing patterns or surveys.

The vast amount of consumer information that brands can gather and analyze has allowed them to improve and personalize their customers’ experiences. But for all the attention Big Data has received, many companies tend to forget about one application of it…Employee Engagement.

When done in the right way, tracking, analyzing and sharing employee performance metrics can be very beneficial for both you and your staff. One of the things that is very powerful is being able to analyze real-time information, boil it down into performance data and empower employees with reports from that data. If you can provide employees with data to do their job better in a succinct, actionable way, it’s very motivating.

The more Big Data can be incorporated into an intimate individual experience, the better. This demonstrates to the employee that the experience is not just off the shelf and that it is relevant to the person. This personal relevance is shown to deliver higher engagement.

Applying Big Data analytics to employees’ performance helps identify and acknowledge not only the top performers, but the struggling or unhappy workers as well.

If you want to introduce analytics technology to your employee engagement strategies, below are a few tips to help you.

Find a program that integrates with your current systems. For any new software that you implement within your company, it’s important to make the transition as seamless and simple for your employees as possible.

The software has to work where the employees work already. You can’t make them switch tasks and go to another platform to aggregate the data stream. The software should genuinely assist the end user. Your choice of software should be a grassroots decision, and you should have buy-in from your employees before you ask them to use the new system.

Consider how employees will view themselves and others. Once you introduce performance and engagement analytics into your company, you’ll have to consider how that program fits into employee relationships and workplace culture as a whole.

A company needs to take into consideration the actions of the employee’s co-workers and how to make these data points of interest to the employee. This helps to foster a respected and trusting engagement experience and data needs to be used to build trust. No matter what solution you choose, an analytics program moves you away from the traditional manual reporting process of performance measurement; helping make your staff more efficient, motivated and engaged.

Business software is in the beginning stages of being useful for performance measurement. Businesses have not pushed for innovation as hard as consumers have, but now that’s starting to change. Think about business processes in a different way and gather data in a way that matters.

Select and focus on the most important metrics.Analytics programs can pull and process data for a large number of metrics. Even when applying Big Data to customer service, many businesses struggle to keep up with the volume of information pouring in. Narrowing down your focus to only the most important key performance indicators (KPIs). Don’t introduce too many metrics, it becomes too difficult and confusing. If you can boil it down to some very simple statistics, like a score that incorporates the elements you want, everyone can focus on consolidated KPIs.

 

Posted in Best Practices for Merchants Tagged with: big data, Business software, consumer, customer, customer service, data, key performance indicators, program, service, social networks, software, web, Web browsing patterns

Facebook set to become P2P player

Facebook is apparently ready to become a person-to-person (P2P) money transfer network. The clear decision to launch a money transfer service in the region can be seen as a test bed for Facebook’s larger ambitions of becoming a payments hub for its 1 billion user base. Facebook was only weeks away from gaining regulatory approval in Ireland for its remittance platform FT quoted unnamed sources. Facebook’s P2P platform will be geared to facilitating migrant remittances, with the goal of expanding its payment presence in emerging markets such as India. Facebook makes the bulk of its revenue from advertising, but 10 percent of its profits reportedly come from in-game payments for online and mobile games, such as Zynga’s popular FarmVille.

From WhatsApp to what’s next

Facebook’s February 2014 acquisition of mobile messaging service WhatsApp for $19 billion clarified the social network’s strategy. The WhatsApp acquisition and the expected P2P network launch as part of the first phase of Facebook’s deeper immersion into payments.

Tech giants face up to payments

When comparing the payment strategies of tech giants Google Inc., Apple Inc. and Facebook, the latter two competitors as having bigger potential upsides than Google. Facebook and Apple (via iTunes) already have established financial relationships with millions of users who have attached funding mechanisms – debit and credit cards –  to their social media accounts. As primarily a search engine, Google is playing catch up to persuade its users to set up Google Wallet accounts.

In May 2013, Google launched its own P2P network by integrating Google Wallet with Gmail accounts, so that wallet users can facilitate money transfers via email. More recently, reports have surfaced indicating Google plans to extend Google Wallet to its wearable technology solution Google Glass. But the success of such ventures rests on users’ confidence with Google as a financial service provider.

Facebook as having a brighter financial services future than Apple. Apple’s reach is limited to consumers who have iPhones and iPads, whereas Facebook is not tied to any branded mobile devices, it is a very ubiquitous offering. It could apply to anybody with any type of phone or tablet.

Eventually, tech companies like Facebook will need to partner with payment businesses in order to expand into the merchant-centric brick-and-mortar world. The mobile POS solution provider, a business unit of global POS terminal manufacturer Ingenico SA, would be an ideal partner for Facebook. If they extend what they do from P2P payments to more of a wallet purchasing capability for their users, then the next step could very easily be an extension of that into servicing the merchant side.

Posted in Financial Services, Mobile Payments, Smartphone Tagged with: Apple Inc.Facebook, consumers, credit cards, debit, device, financial service, financial service provider, Gmail accounts, Google Glass, Google Inc., Google Wallet accounts, ingenico, iPads, iPhones, iTunes, merchant-centric brick-and-mortar, migrant remittances, mobile, Mobile Devices, mobile games, mobile messaging service, mobile pos, mobile POS solution, mobile POS solution provider, money transfer, money transfer network, money transfer service, network, online, p2p, P2P network, P2P payments, P2P platform, payment businesses, payments, payments hub, phone, POS terminal, remittance, remittance platform, search engine, service provider, social media, social media accounts, social networks, tablet, wearable technology

Age of Context and Security

News from Target, increasing the number of cards compromised to 70 million and the expansion of data loss to mailing and email addresses, phone numbers and names, affirms that we are in a security crisis.

Card data is from a brand and business perspective, the new radioactive material. Add personally identifiable information (PII) to the list of toxic isotopes.

The depressing vulnerabilities these breaches reveal are a result of skilled hackers, the Internet’s lack of inherent security, inadequate protections through misapplied tools or their outright absence. Security is very very hard when it comes to playing defense.

There is a set of new technologies that could, in a combination produce a defense in depth that we have not enjoyed for some time.

Looking at the Age of Context (ACTs)

Age of Context released, a book based on the hundreds of interviews conducted with tech start-up and established company leaders. A wide-ranging survey. They examine what happens when our location and to whom we are connected are combined with the histories of where and when we shop. Result is a very clear picture of our needs, wants and even what we may do next.

Combining the smartphone and the cloud, five Age of Context technologies ACTs, will change how we live, interact, market, sell and navigate through our daily and transactional lives. The five technologies are:

1. Big Data. Ocean of data generated from mobile streams and our online activity, can be examined to develop rich behavioral data sets. This data enables merchants to mold individually targeted marketing messages or to let financial institutions improve risk management at an individual level.

2. Geolocation. Nearly every cell phone is equipped with GPS. Mobile network operators and an array of service providers can now take that data to predict travel patterns, improve advertising efficiency and more.

3. Mobile Devices and Communications. These are aggregation points for cloud-based services, sending to the cloud torrents of very specific data.

4. Sensors. Smartphones, wearables (think Fitbits, smart watches and Google Glass) and other devices are armed with accelerometers, cameras, fingerprint readers and other sensors. Sensors enable highly granular contextual placement. A merchant could know not only which building we are at and the checkout line we are standing in but even which stack of jeans we are perusing.

 

5. Social. Social networks map the relationships between people and the groups they belong to, becoming powerful predictors of behavior, affiliations, likes, dislikes and even health. Their role in risk assessment is already growing.

The many combinations and intersections of these technologies are raising expectations and concerns over what is to come. Everyone has a stake in the outcome: consumers, retailers, major CPG brands, watchdog organizations, regulators, politicians and the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay / PayPal and the entire payments industry.

We are at the beginning of the process. We should have misgivings about this and as an industry, individuals and as a society, we need to do better with respect to privacy and certainly with respect to relevance.

Provided we can manage privacy permissions we grant and the occasionally creepy sense that someone knows way too much about us, the intersections of these tools should provide more relevant information and services to us than what we have today. Anyone who has sighed at the sight of yet another web ad for a product long since purchased or completely inappropriate to you understands that personalized commerce has a long way to go. That’s part of what the Age of Context technologies promise to provide.

ACTs in Security    

ACTs role in commerce is one albeit essential application. They have the potential to power security services as well, specially authentication and identity-based approaches. We can combine data from two or more of these technologies to generate more accurate and timely risk assessments.

It doesn’t take the use of all five to make improvements. One firm have demonstrated that the correlation of just two data points is useful, it demonstrated that if you can show that a POS transaction took place in the same state as the cardholder’s location then you can improve risk assessment substantially. (based off of triangulated cell phone tower data).

Powerful questions of each technology that ACTs let us ask:

Data – What have I done in the past? Is there a pattern? How does that fit with what I’m doing now?

Geolocation – What building am I in? Is it where the transaction should be? Which direction am I going in or am I running away?

Mobile – Where does device typically operate? How’s the device configured? Is the current profile consistent with the past?

Sensors – Where am I standing? What am I looking at? Is this my typical walking gait? What is my heart rate and temperature?

 

Social – Am I a real person? Who am I connected to? What is their reputation?

Knowing just a fraction of the answers to these questions places the customer’s transaction origination, the profiles of the devices used to initiate that transaction and the merchant location into a precise context. The result should improve payment security.

More payments security firms are making use of data signals from non-payment sources, going beyond the traditional approach of assessing risk based primarily on payment data. One firm have added social data to improve fraud detection for ecommerce payment risk scoring. Another firm, calling its approach Social Biometrics, evaluates the authenticity of social profiles across multiple social networks including Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and email with the goal of identifying bogus profiles. These tools are of course attractive to ecommerce merchants and others employing social sign on to simplify site registration. That ability to ferret out bogus accounts supports payment fraud detection as well.

This triangulation of information is what creates notion of context. Apply it to security. If you can add the cardholder’s current location based on mobile GPS to the access device’s digital fingerprint to the payment card, to the time of the day when she typically shops, then the risk becomes negligible. Such precise contextual information could pave the way for the retirement of the distinction between card present and card-not-present transactions to generate a card-holder-present status to guide risk decision-making.

Sales First, Then Security        

The use of ACT generated and derived signals will be based on the anticipated return for the investment. Merchants and financial institutions are more willing to pay to increase sales than pay for potential cost savings from security services. As a result, the ACTs will impact commerce decision making first-who to display an ad to, who to provide an incentive to.

New Combinations  

Behind the scene, the impact of the ACTs on security will be fascinating and important to watch. From a privacy perspective, the use of the ACTs in security should prove less controversial because their application in security serves the individual, merchant and the community.

Determining the optimal mix of these tools will take time. How different are the risks for QR-code initiated transactions vs. a contactless NFC transaction? What’s the right set of tools to apply in that case? What sensor-generated data will prove useful? Is geolocation sufficient? Will we find social relationships to be strong predictor of payment risk or are these more relevant for lending? And what level of data sharing will the user allow-a question that grows in importance as data generation and consumption is shared more broadly and across organizational boundaries. It will be important for providers of security tools to identify the minimum data for the maximum result.

I expect the ACT’s to generate both a proliferation of tools to choose from and a period of intense competition. The ability to smoothly integrate these disparate tools sets will be a competitive differentiator because the difficulty of deployment for many merchants is as important as cost. Similar APIs would be a start.

Getting More from What We Already Have  

The relying parties in a transaction – consumers, merchants, banks, suppliers – have acquired their own tools to manage those relationships. Multi-factor authentication is one tool kit. Banks, of course issue payment credentials that represent an account and proxy for the card holder herself at the point of sale or online. Financial institutions at account opening perform know your customer work to assure identity and lower risk.

Those siloed efforts are now entering an era where the federated exchange of this user and transactional data is becoming practical. Firms are building tools and the economic models to leverage these novel combinations of established attributes and ACT generated data.

The ACTs are already impacting the evolution of the payments security market. Payment security incumbents, choose just two from the social side, find themselves in an innovation rich period. Done well, society’s security posture could strengthen.

Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit card Processing, Credit Card Security, e-commerce & m-commerce, Electronic Payments, Internet Payment Gateway, Payment Card Industry PCI Security, Point of Sale, Smartphone, Visa MasterCard American Express Tagged with: big data, breaches, card data, cardholders, checkout lines, commerce, data loss, data sets, digital, ecommerce, geolocation, GPS, inherent security, Merchant's, Mobile Devices, mobile network, online activity, personally identifiable information, pii, POS, Security, security crisis, sensors, smartphone, social networks, transaction, transactional, travel patterns, vulnerabilities