Mastercard plans to incorporate Artificial Intelligence-powered data metrics into its banking and retail clients' day-to-day workflow in China, improve the quality and efficiency of data analytics, and boost returns from this innovation.
A research conducted on 2,000 executives found that only 20 percent of them had adequate data analytics returns. The executives offered four explanations for the research's surprising result, which was conducted jointly earlier this year by Mastercard and Harvard Business Review.
In a recent interview in Beijing, Mastercard Advisors chairperson Dimitrios Dosis said that "today's analytics are taking shape in silos, suggesting that various parts of the company are running their analytics, often giving conflicting results."
There is a big-time difference between when you need the information and when you get it. Sometimes it can take weeks, Dosis said.
He also noted that data analytics is not integrated into the system, adding that when customers need to make decisions, "they don't get it."
Dosis and his team said that what they do is identify a solid opportunity based on clear data and "specify where the opportunity exists and then identify the offer, and test and execute it." The process, Dosis elaborated, is a classic "end-to-end service that we provide to banks, including Chinese banks."
The company is currently developing an end-to-end service technology to make data analytics an effective part of the day-to-day work process. This means that when it happens in the context, people do not need to do precise analyses.
The automated recommendation engine presents the company with the right deals for the right audience, Dosis said. To date, it has been a manual process to extract recommendations, with consultants periodically reviewing the data.
Companies have a lot of data and customers want to interact with them, but they don't clean up the data. As data cleaning takes a lot of time, it may be possible to apply artificial intelligence in the process, Dosis said.
Meanwhile, Mastercard released its SpendingPulse survey, which showed that U.S. retail sales grew by 3.5 percent during the 2019 holiday season, with online sales increasing by nearly 19 percent compared to estimates from the previous year.
Mastercard said that the report outlines holiday shopping from Nov. 1 to Dec. 24. "E-commerce revenues hit a record high this year with more customers doing their online holiday shopping," Steve Sadove, Mastercard senior advisor and former Saks Inc. chairman, said in a statement.
