What is likely to happen? The journey of Prescriptive Analytics

 This is the final frontier in data analytics-- the ability to respond in real time to event data in a way that allows you to back the instincts of the decision maker with data. If your data is telling you what your instincts are saying, the chances of making an informed decision to influence outcomes increases.However, the right questions have to asked of the data otherwise the outcome will not be what was desired.Some examples in banks where...

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What can happen? The story of Predictive Analytics

Predictive Analytics is the process of using a combination of data analysis, statistics and machine learning to make predictions on possible outcomes.Examples of these can be:-predicting when a turbine in a power plant fail operating --this can help schedule maintenance activities  -predicting customer behaviour based on time of our marketing promotions-predicting capital required to meet regulatory requirements based on the volume of loans...

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Why did it happen? The Story of Diagnostic Analytics

 Diagnostic Analytics tries to answer the why something happened in the past  from our data sets- for example why did sales rise this month though we didn't have any marketing campaigns, why did patients in a sample have the same symptoms,why did our bank's customers choose the 5 year fixed mortgage product.Frequently this side of data analytics looks at both internal and external data sets to draw inferences . The process of drawing out...

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What happened? The story of Descriptive Analytics

 The oldest know data analysis consists of two things-aggregating or summarizing data and  data mining.The majority of a company's investment in data analytics is focused on aggregating data-- what was the sales, by month, by region for example.Comparing to previous time periods gives an understanding of where the company is going for instance the sales have increase 20% compared to previous quarter. It is an important tool for analysis...

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Why are banks interested in your data?

 Why are banks interested in customer data? The answer is one word--Steve Jobs.On 29 June 2007 the iPhone was launched. Fast forward 15 years  and the reverberations of iPhone are still being felt. The pandemic has only accelerated these changes.Steve said: "A lot of times people don't know what they want until you show it to them"What did Steve do that was so revolutionary?He showed that a customer centric unified value proposition...

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Where is the action in retail payments?

 In the beginning there was gold  followed by cash. Then came the check. And then came technology where we are now.The best analogy to understand  the action in retail payments is that of a kitchen table where the transaction occurs. The table has 4 legs and the table top. The four legs together with the table top  in our kitchen table example are the basic requirements of creating a transaction.Customer:The  first leg...

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Embedded Finance and Payments

 We have seen a lot of exciting developments in the consumer space introducing payments as a way to enhance revenue and customer interaction. Starting with major tech players like Apple and Google offering wallets for paying merchants, Square added debit cards to its Cash App P2P platform, Uber used the Visa  rails to provide instant payments to its drivers to Shopify adding Stripe's payment processing capability for its merchants.These initiatives have led to revenue gains for all parties but more importantly taken away customers which...

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