The Wonderful Big Data Strategy At Royal Bank Of Scotland

The Royal Bank of Scotland has a new strategy for customer service and its fueled through the use of big data. This strategy is called “personology” and the purpose of the strategy is to get rid of the gap between banks and customers that started in the 70’s. With this strategy, the main goal is to give the most back to the customers and not try to trick customers, but really establish personal relationships with customers. One highlight the article makes is how although the bank was at first very worried about how they would be perceived when they notified customers where they were double charged through different service tied into bank accounts which were found through financial transaction data. But through actually building trust, most nearly all customers kept their accounts with the bank where other banks would not have done this, but keep the profits for themselves which shows how the RBS is using big data to really help customers. Another good point the article brings up is how the bank compares itself to Amazon in their technique where amazon efficiently utilizes such little data of their customers and that banks have so much information on their customers and use such little of it. I found this very interesting because it is so true and that the true idea of banking can change and revolutionize more than it has if all banks start to use “personology” or some customer service platform similar to it.  And a third point I liked from the article is where the plan may go. They believe the future outcome will be artificially intelligent bank managers. It argues that with bank apps and online banking there is already less face-to-face interaction in branches which I think will be inevitable especially with the ability of secure online bank transfers like Apple Pay and apps like Venmo.

              One critique of the article I have is that they do not elaborate enough on the new strategy or what the differences are that have allowed them to make the strategy. They do list what they have used like open source big data technologies like Cloudera Hadoop, Cassandra, and CRM specialist and startup Pegasystems, and I understand they do not want to disclose too much information but more in my opinion would have been good. I found this article that goes more in depth about how RBS uses the SAS and a visual analytics tool in addition in the new strategy (http://www.cbronline.com/news/verticals/finance/rbs-reveals-sas-powered-data-driven-approach-to-tackling-customer-service-4860600). Another critique is I also would have liked to see the numbers with this. The article says that the banks will lose some profit with not double charging customers and the article said RBS spent 100 million pounds on the strategy, but I would like to see more numerical results of the strategy. A final critique is how the divide originally happened in the 70’s. The article mentions how banks used data to mail customers but not what really made the divide and lack of trust.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2016/04/13/the-wonderful-big-data-strategy-at-royal-bank-of-scotland/#537481b43e22