Mastercard announced it has integrated IBM’s Watson technology into its platform to launch a subscription-based customer analytics offering to merchants in mid-2016. Bravo to MasterCard. It has always bewildered me that the major card networks haven’t effectively leveraged their position as the central clearing point for card and merchant transaction data to provide customer insights to merchants (especially smaller merchants who likely lack sophisticated analytics capabilities). The platform will offer real-time customer and competitive insights. MasterCard is emerging as the innovator among the big 4 card network players. Merchants often perceive card acceptance to be an expensive necessity, but innovative merchant-centric products like this could begin to change that perception. Could it be that the card networks are starting to realize that merchants are customers too?
By Tom Dailey|2016-03-16T23:37:48-05:00March 16th, 2016|Analytics, MasterCard|Comments Off on MasterCard’s small merchant customer analytics platform could be a game changer
About the Author: Tom Dailey
Tom E. Dailey provides independent expert strategic and practical advice to merchants, payment processors, investors, law firms and other organizations.
He is a recognized, trusted expert in the card and payments space. As a senior executive at Discover, he managed the multi-billion dollar merchant business unit, including a team over 2,000 across 28 facilities. More recently as CEO at international ecommerce payments processor 2Checkout, Dailey led more than $70 million in funding rounds and a quadrupling of the company’s market valuation.
In addition to consulting, Tom serves in expert witness and litigation support roles for payments-related matters, including expert reports, depositions, court testimony, document reviews and forensic analysis.