by Henry Meier
It’s Tuesday morning and the biggest election winner has already been decided: Big Data. Why? This is the first election in which both campaigns have used cutting-edge data analysis from disparate data bases to figure out who’s going to vote for whom and how they can get him or her to actually vote. This means that the winner of Ohio will have as much to do with who hired the best social science researchers as who actually had the best ideas to lead the country.
“Interesting thought,” you say, but what does it have to do with my credit union? Because as much as the concept of “Big Data” personally gives me the creeps, its impact on virtually every aspect of business is large and getting larger. Your credit union will be shaped by it in the coming years whether or not you realize it.
For example, from reviewing debit and credit card information, and cross-referencing it with other databases, marketers can tell you which of your members spends hundreds of dollars a month shopping but hasn’t visited a competitor for six months. The competitor uses this information to provide a rebate to your member and similarly situated online bankers as she does her online banking. The member accepts the rebate and it is automatically credited to her credit union account. It’s a win-win: the member has a better shopping experience and the credit union gets paid for the placement, providing a useful alternative to the charging of fees. This isn’t science fiction but anexampleof the type of services that have been provided by Cardlytics, a private marketing firm started in 2008.
