PayPal Pairs With Commerce Dept. To Harness Economic Data

How can PayPal gain a better understanding about how consumers spend their money and how U.S. businesses should focus their export efforts to match consumers’ spending needs?

Working with the U.S. Commerce Department to tap into Big Data is one place to start. That’s exactly what’s happening through PayPal’s efforts to team up with the Commerce Department in order to tap into the vast economic data it produces — including everything from consumer spending reports to trade analytics, The Wall Street Journal reported.

While PayPal has its own base of payments data to understand some of the questions it may have about how businesses can make decisions about where to buy, sell and trade, The Commerce Department’s Chief Data Officer Ian Kalin explained to WSJ why the government’s data can help PayPal harness that Big Data to help businesses.

That means increasing the U.S.’ export reach and creating more jobs at home, Kalin said.

“There are literally hundreds of data products coming out of the federal government every day,” Kalin said. “We know the ecosystem of this data, and we can help PayPal and others navigate that for exporters.”

Details of the plans were also revealed via a blog post written by Kalin, PayPal Senior Director of Data Strategy and Stewardship Vadim Kutsyy and Harshal Deo, PayPal’s vice president of data technology. The post also shared more insight into how Big Data can benefit business decision-making.

“Information powers commercial decisions. Yet, small and medium-sized businesses don’t always have the information they need in order to succeed. One of the classic questions that hinders American businesses is where to start exporting or how to expand existing exports,” the post reads.

The PayPal/Commerce Department collaboration was created as a Working Group under the Commerce Data Advisory Council, which is a a Federal Advisory Council whose mission is to “provide advice and recommendations to Secretary Penny Pritzker and federal government leaders on how to make Commerce data easier to find, access, use and combine with other data.”

“Initial experiments with available data indicate that some of the best opportunities may be in providing business owners with targeted benchmarks and opportunity assessments,” the post reads. “Whatever the path of the collaboration, the guiding mission of this Working Group is to create a public and freely accessible platform that can help small and medium-sized businesses increase their overseas exports.”

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