Background Top 5 Canadian bank with large US presence Multi-lines of business including strong consumer credit card portfolio and commercial (merchant) banking business

Heavily invested into centralized data and analytics (D&A) function and providing market insights to their commercial banking customers

Commercial Customer Base Profile Typical customer: retailers and other small businesses, numbering in the tens of thousands, with a smaller number of national chains including some of the most iconic brand names.

Business Problem This bank wanted to enhance the market insights it was providing to its commercial customers, and decided to leverage its anonymized credit and debit card data (as a credit card issuer and personal banking provider) in addition to the merchant payment data feeds it receives from its commercial customers.

****By letting their customer's compare their own retail sales to the broader level of activity that the bank's credit / debit card transactions revealed, it enabled the bank to develop a visual, benchmarking tool. The tool gives the bank's clients the ability to approximate their market share by category by location, and to understand consumer spending patterns over a certain time series.

However, the inconsistency between the richness of the consumer (b2c) feed to that of the merchant (b2b) feed created problems for the bank. Namely, the lack of detail in the merchant (payment processing) feed presented two primary challenges:

1. The challenge in matching (and ultimately mapping) the transaction data to definitive physical locations for retailers because of the lack of address / location insight, and
2. The lack of granularity in the merchant's line of business (aka industry classification) and lack of insight as to their business model (online, offline, or both)

End Solution

Use Case - Bank Transaction Profiling.pdf