Mere weeks ago, I made my predictions of what this decade would bring for the data industry. I said that while the decade we just left behind was largely about collecting and organizing data, the decade in front of us would be about putting these massive datasets to use. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are poised to make data even more powerful and thus valuable … provided of course the underlying data are properly structured and standardized.
Leave it to 2013 Infocommerce Model of Excellence winner Segmint to immediately show us what these predictions mean in practice through its recent acquisition of the Product and Service Taxonomy division of WAND Inc. WAND, by the way, is a 2004 Infocommerce Model of Excellence winner, making us especially proud to report this combination of capabilities.
Segmint is tackling a huge opportunity by helping banks better understand their customers for marketing and other purposes. Banks capture tremendous amounts of transactional activity, much of it in real-time. The banking industry has also invested billions of dollars in building data warehouses to store this information. So far, so good. But if you want to derive insights from all these data, you have to be able to confidently roll it up to get summary data. And that’s where banks came up short. You can’t assess customer spending on home furnishings unless you can identify credit card merchants who sell home furnishings. That’s where Segmint and WAND come in. How many ways can people abbreviate and misspell the name “Home Depot”? Multiply that by billions of transactions and millions of companies, and you start to get the idea of both the problem and the opportunity.
When WAND is done cleaning and standardizing the data, Segmint goes to work with its proprietary segmentation and predictive analytics tools. Segmint helps bank marketers understand the lifestyle characteristics of its customers and target them with appropriate messages both to aid retention and sell new products. These segments are continuously updated via real-time feeds from its bank customers (all fully anonymized). With that level of high quality, real-time and granular data, Segmint can readily move from profiling customers to predicting their needs and interests.
Simply put: this is the future of the data business. It starts with the clean-up work nobody else wants to do (and it’s why data scientists spend more time cleaning data than analyzing it) and then uses advanced software to find actionable, profitable insights from the patterns in that data. This is the magic of the data business that will be realized in this new decade. And we couldn’t be prouder that two Infocommerce Model of Excellence winners are leading the way … together. Congrats to both!