Visa Europe invests in Beyond Analysis for data analytics

Visa represents £1 in every £4 spent in the UK

Visa Europe has invested a "significant" minority stake in data analytics firm Beyond Analysis (BA) in order to bolster the transactional analysis service it offers to merchants and banks.

Visa began working with BA in 2008 and its Chief Marketing Officer, Mariano Dima, has become a board member.

"The relationship will continue along the same lines, but it is going to be deeper," Crispin Rogers, VP of loyalty and merchant analytics for Visa Europe, told Computing.

"We are planning to scale up our activities in this area and thought it would make sense to have more involvement in BA," he added.

Visa Europe represents €1 in every €8 spent across Europe and £1 in every £4 spent in the UK. Visa processes 11bn transactions a year across Europe, and it will use this data to provide a service to merchants and banks.

"We have a massive data set, which is a very rich tool for understanding customer behaviour. The data is anonymous, so we don't know who the customers are, but it does mean we can understand purchase patterns," said Rogers.

BA's CEO, Paul Alexander, provided an example of a recent customer it worked on with Visa, where it analysed transactional data to deliver additional revenue streams.

"We did some work recently for a grocery retailer in the UK that has 60 fewer opening hours on average than its competitors across its entire store base," said Alexander.

"We wanted to understand what might happen if this retailer were to shift its trading hours or extend its opening hours to see what share of wallet they were losing out on to competitors," he added.

"In one store in central London we found that there was a significant loss of trade. We encouraged the store to shift its trading hours from 10:00 to 16:00 through to 11:00 to 17:00 on a Sunday.

So it wasn't extending its hours, just shifting them. Because of the change, this store has seen an uplift of sales on a Sunday worth more than £100,000."

Visa and BA were able to do this by analysing the retailer's transactional data, as well as its competitors, to see if customers are transferring their spending elsewhere during those hours.

"This analysis helped the grocery retailer go back to its board and give them a genuine business case as to why opening hours should be changed," said Alexander.

BA told Computing that it has its own reporting infrastructure but it also uses tools such as SAS, IBM SPSS and open-source tools, to undergo its analytics. Alexander said that the tools it uses depend on the client's needs and the job itself.

"The main obstacles we have had to overcome are around making sure that we are compliant with data protection laws," said Alexander.

"Also analysing the sheer volume of transactional data is no small task. It could be very easy to get lost and drown in it all," he added.

"The trick is to ensure we are aligned with needs of the retailers and banks. It's important to understand their strategy, so whatever we are producing is relevant and allows them to change something internally".