This post was written by James Wallis, Vice President of IBM’s Global Payments Industry and an expert in developing and executing business and customer strategy, with particular focus on payments systems and infrastructure. At IBM, James leads a worldwide payments sales team focused on offering customers compelling payments solutions that meet the business and operational requirements of some of the world’s largest financial service organizations.
In today’s digital economy, fewer and fewer transactions today actually use cash. That means a lot of money has been transformed into zeros and ones. It’s intangible, invisible. It’s information.
The only way to turn this numerical ocean of credit and risk into meaningful insight for actionable intelligence is through the use of technology. Specifically, through the use of analytics technology. A few weeks ago, at our annual Information on Demand conference, IBM recognized Visa’s leadership in using cutting-edge information technology and real-time data analytics to drive growth, prevent fraud and improve the consumer payment experience.
Being cited as the winner of this award says a lot about what Visa is doing right in the industry. Visa has successfully set itself apart from competitors as a leading innovator of payments— for its mastery of information in real-time. IBM’s own market research has found that excelling at client-service is one of the only clear paths to profitability in today’s competitive marketplace. By effectively using analytics, Visa is able to do just this by providing value-added services for merchant banks, retailers and cardholders alike.
And Visa is not alone in embracing analytics. Hundreds of companies around the world, across dozens of different industries, are embracing the power of analytics to gain business insight from their data. In fact, IBM is making its own big bet on the use of analytics to transform businesses and industries. To date, IBM has invested more than $14 billion in business analytics which includes 24 acquisitions, as well as organic innovation.
Each transaction in the Visa network has a story and with every swipe of a Visa card, the amount of data in that story grows. More transactions equate to more data and more data means more complexity in the systems that manage the network. Visa can continue to lead the industry in payments technology processing by continuing to commit to robust data analytics.
Posted by: James Wallis, Vice President of IBM's Global Payments Industry on November 17, 2010 at 5:57 pm
