Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Mon, Feb 01, 2010
I have always believed that banks can do much more with the consumer data that they have without sacrificing any consumer privacy guidelines. Imagine the power of Debit & Credit card retail spends information.
Here is an interesting initiative from Citibank called Bundle. It showcases proprietary data, sourced from Citibank's massive card-spending warehouse.
The site is based completely on spend data, showing household spending personalized to your specific location. There's also professional personal finance advice mixed with stories and comment from the community. Even the articles use the database to illustrate points.
Imagine the power of Analytics in driving this business model forward. In India it would be interesting to see a bank use its large Debit card base to build an application like this.
Have a look at this application at:
http://www.bundle.com/
Jim Bruene at Netbanker has some very good analysis on this(in his words):
If they want to attract data junkies like myself, the data needs to be more transparent and they need more robust tools to play with it. I enjoyed being able to compare the spending of my Seattle neighbors against that of my home town in Iowa (it's surprisingly similar). But I was left with a number of questions:
* Where does the spending data come from? The FAQs are vague on saying that it comes from Citibank card data, government sources and "other third parties."
* If its primarily Citibank card data, is it really representative of the entire town or just the people that hold Citibank cards? For example, Bundle tells me (screenshot #3), that the average dining out expense in Seattle is $115 and the most common spot is Starbucks followed by McDonalds. Something seems wrong with that.
* And furthermore, are these estimates of all spending or just that on Citibank cards? And which Citi portfolios are included? What about business cards?
Check out Jim’s comments at
http://www.netbanker.com/topics.htm