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Sean Lee, director of financial services at EMC Corp, a major US-based data management firm, who attended an Asian bankers’ meeting in Bangkok this week, says it’s time for financial institutions to monetise their massive databases and make banking relevant in this fast-changing digital era.

“Every financial institution typically has a lot of data, so they are trying to create a new revenue stream out of that. From the CIO and CTO perspective, they are supposed to help bankers gather the information, analyse it and make use of that information.

“We’re talking about “Big Data”, which means three things: the volume, variety and velocity or speed. In terms of volume, today we count the data volume, not in megabytes, gigabytes or terabytes, but in zettabytes which have a total of 12 zeros.

“The data volume being generated in this Internet era is growing very fast, but the interesting point is that there is also a lot of semantic or language-based data such as e-mails, messages, social media feeds tied with transactional data. That’s what the banks here and in this region are focusing on.

“In terms of data variety, we’re working with some retail and commercial banks to help them form an affiliated network of clients to marry the transactional aspects of payment and banking with the behaviour aspects of users or end-consumers.

 “We have to put them together to make use of it. For retailers, they still operate separately on their own so they don’t know if you have purchased a suit, or if you have to go another store to buy a necktie or a shirt or a new pair of shoes.

“Via the affiliated network of these retailers and other vendors, banks can correlate that information and then have promotional or advertising campaigns or discount offers sent to end-consumers’ mobile phones.

“In this context, banks have a unique advantage, as they see across the board. In the US, Walmart, Amazon.com or Ebay, as well as physical store chains, on-lines and hybrids have already leveraged that by themselves or in cooperation with banking institutions or card processors such as Visa and Mastercard.

“We help them do that by providing real-time analytic engines that seep behind those transactional layers so that we can help organisations in the affiliated network predict what consumers will buy next.

“Today’s technology enables us to do all these things as soon as you swipe your credit card at a retail store to buy a suit. The system knows immediately who you are and what is your history of purchases.

“The system also leverages location services of mobile phones so they know which shopping malls you are at and which nearby stores offer the items you may want, so we foresee more banks and retailers working together to make use of this era of big data.

“The global positioning system [GPS] today also enables us to personalise the customer experience. When you turn it on, the system knows where you are. That piece of information, combined with who you are as the owner of the phone, helps us do the matching in real time,” he says.

Unless banks and other financial institutions quickly catch up with changing consumer behaviour, their traditional banking services, which are essentially information- and relationship-based, will be increasingly displaced by retailers, telecom service providers and other enterprises, who can jointly serve end-consumers directly.