Patrick Neale, senior vice president and senior product manager at Bank of America, told PYMNTS that data can be used to make smarter business decisions across all varieties of operations. However, the trick is collecting it, parsing it and making sure the right sets of eyes are analyzing it.
To start with, there’s an overwhelming amount of data out there, residing on hard drives, for example. Collectively, we’re storing a lot of it on presentation layers. Transaction messages themselves are becoming more data rich, due to various ISO standards, which contain hundreds of data fields.
With all that information at hand, Neale said, making smarter business decisions can be tied to focusing on what he termed “a very finite subset of what you’re trying to accomplish — and to get some visibility into your business, and the things you may want to improve.”
For payments firms, those areas include, but are not limited to, authorization, chargeback rates, expenses and cash flow.
An Optimal Approach
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An optimal approach for data, he said, includes taking a tiered approach to analysis and making sure there are employees in place who have the right experience to make strategic assessments.
Related: Banks Pilot Information-Sharing Projects to Reduce Fraud
Neale noted that the emergence of platforms has been a boon, with a seemingly infinite amount of capability to craft customer reports. Platforms also level the playing field for smaller firms, he said, which haven’t had the resources on hand to compete with their larger brethren.
Improved data collection and analysis, he said, can spur companies to work with their acquirer partners to get better assistance on payments or manage their supply chains more adroitly. He said that level of granular detail — and strategic information — could have helped many companies anticipate and adjust to situations like the semiconductor chip shortages.
Multi-Layered Approach
That multi-layered, multi-angled approach has a particular urgency in the current macro environment, Neale said. Companies across all verticals have to examine all business units to gauge underperformance and customer demand, as well as geographical and demographic trends, he added.
“You may be encountering something that is very ‘local’ to a unit” when it comes to payments, he said, which may necessitate further action. Alternatively, a cursory glance at data without context may be glossing over the fact that a unit is actually outperforming its geographic backdrop.
See also: Bank of America: Reflections From a Payments Product Designer
As an example, Neale mentioned the quick-service restaurant industry, which is marked by an ever-rising tide of card-not-present transactions. Web presence might have been minimal before the pandemic, but that all changed in a heartbeat. One level of data that could change — and has been changing — the restaurant landscape has been the curbside interaction.
“They’re facilitating orders even though there is social distancing going on,” Neale said, which in turn drives payments volumes. “You’ve got to manage these channels to do what you want in order to serve your customers and navigate these business cycles.”
