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Standard Bank platform tracks customer behaviour trends

Sibahle Malinga
By Sibahle Malinga, ITWeb senior news journalist.
Johannesburg, 06 Mar 2018
Lincoln Mali, group head of card and emerging payments at Standard Bank.
Lincoln Mali, group head of card and emerging payments at Standard Bank.

Standard Bank has introduced a new online platform that gives local merchants better insight into customer behaviour.

According to the bank, the new platform, CustomerView, accessed via the bank's Merchant Online system, was developed in an effort to assist entrepreneurs and businesses to maximise their growth potential, and to change the paradigm of customer interaction.

The tool provides an online dashboard that provides merchants with aggregated data insights to understand the demographics of the Standard Bank customer base in their trading area, including age, gender, income, spending patterns; behavioural and purchase choices. Merchants can use CustomerView data to identify a particular market segment that they would like to target.

Lincoln Mali, group head of card and emerging payments at Standard Bank, says the platform has the ability to improve outcomes for merchants in current volatile economic conditions.

"This solution operates at the intersection of the acquiring (merchants) market and the issuing (cardholders) market and by better understanding cardholder behaviour, merchants can influence turnover growth. It has the potential to improve outcomes for merchants by helping them make informed business decisions based on predictive analytics and thereby drive sales," says Mali.

The bank says it completed a successful pilot phase of the online dashboard across 12 clients in October and November last year and the solution yesterday went live to up to 10 000 select credit and debit card merchants on the bank's platform.

The pilot phase, according to the bank took place across an array of businesses, from cinemas, appliance stores, restaurants, cash and carry to sports clothing stores.

Julian Turner, head of data management, card and emerging payments at Standard Bank, has been managing the development of CustomerView from conception and he says the feedback has been very good. As a result, the bank intends scaling the tool up quite considerably in the future.

Andrew Wilmot, head of merchant solutions SA, Group Card and Emerging Payments at Standard Bank, sees CustomerView as an additional service the bank offers alongside various acceptance platforms which include cash back, contactless, with Instant Money redemption and merchant funding to be added soon.

"Leading insights gleaned from the tool offer businesses a decisive edge - in nearly all cases in our pilot the feedback was that they were shown trends they had not known about before," adds Turner.

With South Africa's economy stuck in a moribund state, the spark for growth and jobs needs to come from innovation across the real economy and from deep within supply chains.

"All businesses are grappling with many of the same challenges, but there are also a number of exciting opportunities to be exploited. Those may, however, have been hiding just beneath the surface and we intend to assist businesses to bring these to light," says Turner.

CustomerView, according to the bank, is being offered to merchants for free, with the intention to introduce a measure of pricing in the future. The key, however, is to protect the identity of the customer's cardholder information - the identities of clients are therefore totally secure on the platform.

Data analytics has become a lucrative investment for businesses, particularly those wanting to make more accurate forecasts and much-needed changes, in turn increasing the organisation's profit margins.

Last year, local retailer Woolworths SA rolled out its software-as-a-service platform across 500 Woolworths stores which allows retailers to get a better understanding of customer preferences, track customer traffic throughout its stores, and improve customer service.

Gerald Naidoo, CEO of integrated business solutions firm Logikal Consulting, says harnessing the power of data analytics can drastically improve the operational performance of a company, drive mass customisation, enable better targeting of customers, and drive new ways of doing business. "Harnessing this data, however, is not as easy as it might seem. Too few businesses understand the potential of data analytics, and therefore the positive impact analytics could have on the business."

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