Remember the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark? After a harrowing adventure, the object of Indiana Jones’ obsession – an item with immeasurable power – ends up crated and stored in a vast warehouse, presumably never to be seen or used again.
Business data often follows a similar story arc. People and companies embark on mighty quests to generate and collect valuable data. They gather plentiful information about their customers’ wants, needs, and habits, and hope to unleash the untapped power trapped within it. But too frequently, the product of those efforts ends up locked away, difficult to access and eventually forgotten.
Your big data efforts shouldn’t work this way, says Peter Hoopes, Vice President and General Manager of Actuate’s BIRT Analytics division. “The business owns the data,” Hoopes says. “They created the data, so the data really should be in the hands of the business.”
How you can make that happen is the subject of Analytics in Financial Services – Unlock the Power of Big Data to Build Winning Customer-Centric Strategies, a 30-minute webinar presented last week by Hoopes and Actuate sales engineer Brett Olmstead, now available for free replay. Hoopes lays out the business case for BIRT Analytics in the webinar, then Olmstead walks through a 15-minute demonstration of the product.
Olmstead’s demo shows how a financial services company can use BIRT Analytics to better understand and serve its best customers. “We’re going to ask questions that you probably think of all the time,” Olmstead said to the webinar audience. “Who are my most profitable customers? What are they like? How do I find more of them? How can I better understand them?”
Answers to these questions are a few clicks away because BIRT Analytics integrates three critical functions for putting data in the hands of business users:
- BIRT Analytics brings all data together – data from multiple sources – in a fast columnar database with write-back capability
- Advanced analytical algorithms and routines are pre-coded into the product and optimized for maximum performance
- BIRT Analytics’ visual interface enables business users to employ advanced analytical tools to detect hidden relationships, patterns and trends
Olmstead runs his demonstration on an ordinary business-class laptop, but works with a huge dataset – transactional records for a million financial services customers, with about 52 million rows of data totaling close to a billion cells. Olmstead quickly identifies the most-profitable 20 percent using a Quantile tool. He then profiles those customers and visualizes them with a Pareto tool (shown below), evaluates and segments them further using Z-Score, then applies Association Rules to identify customers that are most receptive to new offers. Finally, he visualizes the data using an interactive, clickable Venn diagram. The entire process, including invoking advanced analytical routines formerly available only to data scientists, is completed using a point-and-click interface and no coding.
If you want to release the power that’s locked in your data, invest half an hour to catch the replay of Analytics in Financial Services – Unlock the Power of Big Data to Build Winning Customer-Centric Strategies. Learn more about BIRT Analytics and start your 30-day free trial today.