Category: Consumer Profiling

How BMW Uses Artificial Intelligence & Big Data To Design And Build Cars Of Tomorrow

1/8/2017

BMW creates some of the most high-tech cars we have yet seen. The German giant builds 2.5 million vehicles e

BMW creates some of the most high-tech cars we have yet seen. The German giant builds 2.5 million vehicles every year and sells them all over the world. But technology is not just limited to the cars it builds, its business model is built on Big Data which drives everything it does across design, engineering, production, sales and customer support.

Thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI), data-driven predictive analytics and other cutting edge technologies BMW is able to build the cars of today while at the same time envisaging and bringing to reality the cars of tomorrow.
BMW is clearly confident in its belief that cars of the near future will pilot themselves, rather than relying on human drivers. All the big auto manufacturers are staking their claim in a driverless future, but BMW has done so with more confidence than most. It has stated that its aim is for its vehicles to achieve full “level 5” autonomy by 2021.

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THE IMPACT OF BIG DATA ON BANKING AND FINANCIAL SYSTEMS

25/7/2017

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Today, most banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) organizations are working hard to adopt a fully data-driven approach to grow their businesses and enhance the services they provide to customers. Like most other industries, analytics will be a critical game changer for those in the financial sector.
Though many BFSI organizations are beginning to disrupt their analytics landscapes by gathering immense volumes of data assets, these companies are at varying levels of Big Data maturity. In many cases, these initial data projects lead business stakeholders to a very simple question: “How can this data help us solve our business problems?”
As customer volume increases, it dramatically affects the level of services offered by the organization. Existing data analytics practices have simplified the process of monitoring and evaluation of banks and other financial services organizations, including vast amounts of client data such as personal and security information. But with the help of Big Data, banks can now use this information to continually track client behavior in real time, providing the exact type of resources needed at any given moment. This real-time evaluation will in turn boost overall performance and profitability, thus thrusting the organization further into the growth cycle.
Identifying more areas where Big Data resources can be utilized most efficiently involves the alignment of business cases and technological capabilities, which reveals opportunities for improved business processes. There are three primary areas where banks and other financial organizations can attain benefits from advanced analytics: the customer experience, operation optimization, and employee engagement.
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With Whole Foods Purchase, Amazon Just Bought a Playground for Big Data

23/6/2017

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Last week, Amazon announced its intended fourth quarter acquisition of Whole Foods Markets for $42 per share in cash. The $13.7 billion acquisition is being hailed as Amazon’s big play to enter brick-and-mortar retail. It will also have a playground for disrupting retail. Whole Foods offers Amazon the opportunity to experiment with retail analytics, customer traffic management and in-store preference-matching. It’ll be a testing ground for the unexplored science of “presence marketing,” the layering online and offline buying analytics while tracking customers' movements while they shop.
Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods isn’t about automating checkout -- it’s about bringing Amazon’s online analytics to the offline world. It’s about gaining insight into customers from their in-store buying habits and blending online and offline in real-time. Amazon purchased Whole Foods to disrupt what we know as retail.
First, it will be about the WiFi. Most of us don’t hop on the Whole Foods WiFi, but my bet is you will have lots of encouragement to do so after Amazon’s acquisition. Amazon filed a patent in 2012 for something called “Physical Store Online Shopping Control” and that patent was awarded last week, just days before Amazon announced it was buying Whole Foods. Although the patent permits Amazon to limit searches on competitive websites while in a physical store, it also allows for the capturing of the customer's location and the collection of customer data while inside a store.
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Insurers warned against failure to harness big data

17/3/2017

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Big data transformation has begun in the insurance industry and insurers that fail to keep pace will be at a disadvantage, Fitch Ratings has warned.
The agency said the industry is starting to catch up with other sectors in terms of big data adaptation now that insurers have realised the potential of modern big data.
According to the ratings agency, harnessing big data is proving essential for insurers seeking to maintain and increase market share and profitability.
We expect early movers to gain a significant advantage, with the reward on technology investment increased by scale and network benefits,” Fitch said.

“Those who reach critical mass first can pick the best risks and achieve operational cost efficiencies compared to the laggards.”

On the other hand, Fitch said insurers that fail to keep pace in terms of exploiting big data risk being marginalised or coming under pressure to consolidate.

“Smaller insurers that lack the resources to invest are most at risk,” Fitch said.
Big data could transform many elements of the insurance business, Fitch noted, such as distribution, risk selection, pricing and claims management.
The most obvious potential for big data is in improving risk analysis and pricing, it states. Non-life insurers have made the most progress so far, using data analytics and predictive models for greater price segmentation and optimising claims management.

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Big-Data Disruption Gets Real for Car Insurers as O2 Expands

6/3/2017

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Auto insurance may be on the brink of an incursion from mobile-phone and technology companies.
Telefonica SA’s O2 unit -- one of the first mobile operators in Britain to offer car insurance -- expanded its product line in February to include telematics boxes, which track people’s driving habits and can lead to cheaper premiums for youngsters. That’s stoking speculation that a wave of fintech companies will push into the market and disrupt the way insurers interact with customers.
Cell-phone or Internet companies could, for example, use the massive amount of data they hold on their customers to sell them car insurance, bypassing traditional brokers and price-comparison websites. Alphabet Inc.’s Google entry into price comparisons last year failed, but analysts say the web giant could come back and have another go.
“No doubt Google will figure out a way to come back,” said Christopher Ling, a regional leader at Capgemini SA’s insurance practice for the U.K. and Europe in London. “For O2, it’s more dipping a toe in the water at the moment. Other ideas could be using mobile-phone data for home and health monitoring and the insurance associated with that.”
Google did not respond to requests for comment.
The insurance industry has long feared the entry of companies such as Google, Amazon.com Inc. or Facebook Inc. which have a closer relationship to customers -- and above all better data on them. The potential disruption to the market is adding to pressure on providers already seeing their investments hurt by record-low interest rates.
Insurers are reacting to the challenge. Allianz SE Chief Executive Officer Oliver Baete has pledged to make Europe’s biggest insurer “digital by default” to help boost productivity and retain clients. Thomas Buberl, CEO of Axa SA, told investors last year that “customers are now used to buying things at Amazon to interact with Google and Facebook, they are demanding the same from us and, as you can imagine, buying an insurance policy at Axa is not yet quite the same as buying a book at Amazon.”

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How big data analytics help hotels gain customers' loyalty

14/2/2017

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To attract visitors and to encourage guests to return, hotels have come up with many unique amenities over the years. But until recently, many of these hotel amenities were determined by "gut feel" and manual surveys of customers in which guests were asked which free amenities they enjoyed most. Now, thanks to analytics, the task of determining the right amenities for a hotel to offer has become more scientific.

"We want to help hotels determine which free amenities give them the best chance to boost their hotel's appeal, increase sales, and improve customer satisfaction," said Anil Kaul, CEO of Absolutdata, which provides marketing and customer analytics to hotels.

Kaul characterizes the hotel industry as a "constant war of amenities." Hotels know that free amenities bring in customers, but they also know they're competing against other hotels that offer free amenities, so it's important to offer a set of amenities that customers are most attracted to.
Hotels deal with two scenarios when it comes to attracting customers. "The first scenario is when the customer first begins to seek a hotel. You want to offer a free amenity package that will convince him or her to choose your hotel over many other possibilities," said Kaul. "The second scenario is providing a great customer experience to your guest during his or her stay. Part of this customer satisfaction is achieved by offering the right free amenities. If you do this well, the guest is likely to return."
So, which free amenities are most likely to get customers in the door the first time?

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Really Big Data At Walmart: Real-Time Insights From Their 40+ Petabyte Data Cloud

23/1/2017

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Walmart – the world’s biggest retailer with over 20,000 stores in 28 countries, is in the process of building the world’ biggest private cloud, to process 2.5 petabytes of data every hour.

To make sense of all of this information, and put it to work solving problems, the company has created what it calls its Data Café – a state-of-the-art analytics hub located within its Bentonville, Arkansas headquarters.
Here, over 200 streams of internal and external data, including 40 petabytes of recent transactional data, can be modelled, manipulated and visualized. Teams from any part of the business are invited to bring their problems to the analytics experts and then see a solution appear before their eyes on the nerve centre’s touch screen “smart boards”.
This tool has cut down the amount of time it takes to solve complex business questions, which are reliant on multiple external and internal variables, from weeks to minutes.

Senior Statistical Analyst Naveen Peddamail – who won his job with the company through a competition on crowd-sourced data competition website Kaggle – spoke about the project.
He said “If you can’t get insights until you’ve analyzed your sales for a week or a month, then you’ve lost sales within that time.
“If you can cut down that time from two or three weeks to 20 or 30 minutes, then that saves a lot of money for Walmart and stopped us losing sales. That’s the real value of what we have built with the data café.”
When bombarded with huge amounts of verified, quantifiable data at high speeds, problems caused by human error or miscalculation at the planning or execution stage of a particular business activity will often simply melt away.

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No Credit History? No Problem. Lenders Are Looking at Your Phone Data - Bloomberg

29/11/2016

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Financial institutions, overcoming some initial trepidation about privacy, are increasingly gauging consumers’ creditworthiness by using phone-company data on mobile calling patterns and locations.

The practice is tantalizing for lenders because it could help them reach some of the 2 billion people who don’t have bank accounts. On the other hand, some of the phone data could open up the risk of being used to discriminate against potential borrowers.

Phone carriers and banks have gained confidence in using mobile data for lending after seeing startups show preliminary success with the method in the past few years. Selling such data could become a more than $1 billion-a-year business for U.S. phone companies over the next decade, according to Crone Consulting LLC.

Fair Isaac Corp., whose FICO scores are the world’s most-used credit ratings, partnered up last month with startups Lenddo and EFL Global Ltd. to use mobile-phone information to help facilitate loans for small businesses and individuals in India and Russia. Last week, startup Juvo announced it’s working with Liberty Global Plc’s Cable & Wireless Communications to help with credit scoring using cellphone data in 15 Caribbean markets.

And Equifax Inc., the credit-score company, has started using utility and telecommunications data in Latin America over the past two years. The number of calls and text messages a potential borrower in Latin America receives can help predict a consumer’s credit risk, said Robin Moriarty, chief marketing officer at Equifax Latin America.

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How BMW Uses Artificial Intelligence & Big Data To Design And Build Cars Of Tomorrow

THE IMPACT OF BIG DATA ON BANKING AND FINANCIAL SYSTEMS

With Whole Foods Purchase, Amazon Just Bought a Playground for Big Data

Insurers warned against failure to harness big data

Big-Data Disruption Gets Real for Car Insurers as O2 Expands

How big data analytics help hotels gain customers' loyalty

Really Big Data At Walmart: Real-Time Insights From Their 40+ Petabyte Data Cloud

No Credit History? No Problem. Lenders Are Looking at Your Phone Data - Bloomberg

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The leading "Management Consultants in Big Data"
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Categories

Archives

The leading ​"Management Consultants in Big Data"Business-Savvy, Vendor-Independent Expertsto help you thrive in the Big Data JungleUK - 0207 164 6260USA - 415-500-9874Or click here to contact us

The leading "Management Consultants in Big Data"
Business-Savvy, Vendor-Independent Experts
to help you thrive in the Big Data Jungle

UK - 0207 164 6260
USA - 415-500-9874
Or click here to contact us