Institution
Best practices in big data analytics Best practices in big data analytics data big in practices Best
1 Learning 9 Themes ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Maha Khan wrote this Snapshot, with inputs from Marissa Dean. This Snapshot was supported by the Mastercard Foundation.
NOTES
The views presented in this paper are those of the author(s) and the Partnership, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Mastercard Foundation or Caribou Digital.
For questions or comments please contact us at [email protected].
RECOMMENDED CITATION
Partnership for Finance in a Digital Africa, “Snapshot 9: Best Practices in Big Data Analytics,” Farnham, Surrey, United Kingdom: Caribou Digital Publishing, 2017. http://www.financedigitalafrica.org/snapshots/9/2017/.
ABOUT THE PARTNERSHIP
The Mastercard Foundation Partnership for Finance in a Digital Africa (the “Partnership”), an initiative of the Foundation’s Financial Inclusion Program, catalyzes knowledge and insights to promote meaningful financial inclusion in an increasingly digital world. Led and hosted by Caribou Digital, the Partnership works closely with leading organizations and companies across the digital finance space. By aggregating and synthesizing knowledge, conducting research to address key gaps, and identifying implications for the diverse actors working in the space, the Partnership strives to inform decisions with facts, and to accelerate meaningful financial inclusion for people across sub-Saharan Africa.
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www.mastercardfdn.org/financial-inclusion-program/
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2 www.financedigitalafrica.org website. Design by
Caribou Digital Publishing catalog number CAR/016.9 What we know
The Partnership for Finance in a Digital Africa (FiDA) It’s simple: The better you hopes to catalyze digital financial services DFS( ) that know your customer, the better are tailored to user needs, varied in terms of services your product will be offered, easy for customers to use, and woven into At the end of the day, digital finance providers people’s daily lives. To be successful, providers must work to satisfy customers — if a product does not develop a deep understanding of customer needs and meet customers’ needs and demands, usage will be behaviors and the ability to engage with customers low and the product will likely fail. Most providers using technology. In this context, customer data conduct basic research on their clients — for example, is paramount to effective product development telecom providers use demographic and geographic and delivery. However, while there are emerging information to decide who to target at a macro level.1 opportunities, there are also challenges around Increasingly, digital data2 (electronic data generated collecting, maintaining, and analyzing customer on computers, phones, etc.) enables digital finance data. Organizations cannot always easily adopt best providers to overlay information from a wide range practices. Moreover, delivering financial services of sources to yield more precise, tailored insights for responsibly means adhering to practices that safeguard specific target groups. According to CGAP,3 financial customers’ privacy and security. While the space itself service providers can use digital data to: is new and evolving, best practices around big data 1 Find new customers, analytics are emerging. In this Snapshot, we discuss learnings around 2 Deepen customer relationships, and best practices for delivering the next generation of 3 Manage risks. digital financial services successfully and responsibly. Beyond generating insights, providers can also use Specifically, this Snapshot will focus on how big digital data to segment customers — that is, to divide data analytics can improve product design and the a customer base into groups of individuals that are implementation of the next generation of digital similar in specific ways relevant to financial services. financial services. Each subsequent Snapshot Refresh Customer segmentation helps providers understand within Learning Theme 9 will focus on a particular where significant proportions of their customer
Best practices in big data analytics data big in practices Best type of best practice or on a different part of the value base may be stuck in terms of their digital finance chain, such as financial responsibility practices in journey. For example, a customer at the “awareness”
delivering next generation digital financial services. stage may know about a mobile money service but may not understand how to use the service or how it can benefit them. As customers become more knowledgeable and begin to interact with the service, What we know we What they move through stages along the adoption journey, 3 as illustrated in Figure 1 below.4
1 Chen and Faz, “Hype or Hope? Implications of Big Data for Financial Inclusion.” 2 More broadly, digital data seeks to capture elements of the physical world and simulate them for technological use, for example, by storing complex audio, video, or text information in a series of binary characters, traditionally ones and zeros, or “on” and “off” values (Accion Global, Unlocking the Promise of Big Data to Promise Financial Inclusion). 3 Chen and Faz, “The Potential of Digital Data: How Far Can It Advance Financial Inclusion?” 4 Levin and Camner, “Getting the Most Out of Your Data: Segmenting Your Mobile Money Customer Base to Drive Usage.” A customer’s journey 1 in mobile money adoption