Coffee Talk - Analytics in Retail Banking

Marketelligent CEO - Roy Cherian and Head of Analytics - Anunay Gupta will be holding a coffee talk on Analytics in Retail Banking July 28 and 29 in Jakarta, Indonesia.

For more details and registration, please visit:

Risk Analytics

•     Customer Acquisitions: Approval and conversion scorecards.  Acquiring for profits
•     Pricing: Predictive risk scorecards; Risk-based pricing
•     Credit Line Management: Initial credit lines; ongoing credit line management
•     Collections: delinquency management; maximizing collection ROI

Marketing Analytics

•     Marketing $ optimization: optimizing investments across channels and products
•     Customer segmentation: value-based segmentation
•     Customer Lifetime Value: concept of a forward-looking customer lifetime value and its relevance to Banking
•     Cross-selling: enhancing loyalty and engagement by targeted cross-selling

Fundamentals of Risk Management

Let me share a wonderful video on Risk Management over here. Dr. Suman Banerjee of Tulane University's A. B. Freeman School of Business examines risk management and how it impacts corporate decisions in good times and in bad.

Dr. Banerjee talks about his award winning Risk Management paper. He discusses some of the common problem like -- What is financial risk management and how does it impact corporate value?

Dr. Banerjee's lecture explains the need for risk management and how it has arrived at the forefront of corporate management and investment strategy.

It is a inspiring talk. Enjoy it.

Basics of marketing analytics: Predictive Analytics @ SAS Customer Intelligence

I just found an interesting video from SAS which talks about Predictive Analytics. Neil Hayward from Global Consumer Intelligence Practice department of SAS Inc explains the technical and business aspects of Predictive Models. He also covers some implications on business areas like Risk Management.

Here's the video from Youtube. Hope you enjoy it.

Lean & Mean

Marketelligent has been involved with a couple of large global CPG companies over the last few months; helping them in optimizing their Supply Chains. The work we have been doing has given us some good insights into the tangible benefits of this investment.

Essentially, supply chain optimization boils down to two things:
1. Ensuring that all end-consumer demand is fulfilled (Implying higher Revenues from higher sales)
2. Filling this demand with the least amount of inventory in the pipeline (Implying lower costs due to less money tied up in inventories)

#1 - "Ensuring that all end-consumer demand is fulfilled" is not as simple as it seems. Typically most manufacturers don't have a good view of end consumer demand. They typically have good visibility till their distributors; post which haziness sets in.  So visibility from distributors to retailers and from retailers to end-consumers is almost nil.  And in economies where bulk of consumer sales happens via the small to medium format retailers (as opposed to Wal-mart type boxes where POS data is backward integrated to manufacturers), it can be a significant issue.

Most manufacturers however have a very good view of their Sales and as a result, often wrongly extrapolate this to Demand. The appropriate way to do this extrapolation would be to also track 'Stock-outs' at a SKU level, track promotion effectiveness and decompose their incremental impact on sales, etc. A fairly complicated area, filled by a few unique solutions - Oracle Demantra, SAP APO, etc. Have not used them, but they claim they accurately help a business manage Demand.

Another way of accurately measuring Demand would be to have unconstrained supply for a few months. So there are no chances of stock-outs and as a result Sales = Demand.  Possible but expensive given that most manufacturers have hundreds of SKU's, and the costs to have unconstrained supply for a few months means a lot of working capital.

More on #2 - "Filling this demand with the least amount of inventory in the pipeline" in a subsequent post.

Cricket Live Predictions : mswinger

Over the last few months, we have been attempting to develop a tool to add predictive intelligence to the game of Cricket.  Our first offering in this area is for One Day Internationals (ODI) - mswinger. 

The tool does a couple of things:
- predict which team is going to win the ODI.  Predictions start off once the toss is done and continue in real-time throughout the match.  Predictions are based on historical data - approximately 300 matches and 500 variables - and are continuously updated to reflect recent performance.
- help a team plan its strategy on a real-time basis so as to ensure a win.

Catch a live demo of the beta version of the tool at www.mswinger.com ; you can get a schedule of upcoming ODI's here.   Next steps are to extend this capability to the immensely exciting T20 format.