It’s no secret that in today’s environment, businesses are having to operate with more limited budgets and resources. So when it comes to growth initiatives such as opening new stores, making the right decisions is more critical than ever.

“There’s no room for failure,” observes Enrique del Rio Mancebon, Managing Director, Lloyds Bank Market Intelligence (LBMI). “In the past, it might have been feasible to live with a certain amount of failure, but today it’s essential to get it right.”

And with customer behaviour patterns evolving rapidly, companies can benefit from access to accurate and timely information in order to inform and support decision making.

Helping companies grow

As the biggest financial services group in the UK, the bank is one of the country’s largest custodians of customer data.

With 28 million customers, Lloyds has access to large volumes of information about the payments those customers make using instruments such as direct debits, debit cards and credit cards.

Consequently, LBMI aggregates and anonymises data about customer spending with specific brands and merchants, and offers it as a service to large corporates, mid-corporates and institutions. Senior leaders can then use the information as an input into their strategic planning.

A supermarket, for example, will have extensive knowledge of its own business and its own customers’ behaviour. “But what they don’t know is what their customers are doing outside of their transactions with that supermarket, and how the supermarket is performing against its peers,” says del Rio Mancebon.

“We can work with them to provide that information to support their business decisions on what to do next.”

Harnessing large-scale transactional data

Armed with comprehensive data, businesses are better placed to understand whether they are losing or gaining market share at a national, regional or local level, and how this picture may vary between online and in-store channels.

Businesses can also gain a clearer understanding of the profile and behaviour of their customers, such as the average age of customers, or the distance they are travelling to reach a particular store.

Use cases for large-scale transaction data include:

• Performance and brand tracking. Companies can harness a bird’s eye view of national, regional, and sectoral spending trends and identify brand or asset performance over time.

• Opening a new location. Businesses can use transaction data to input into decisions about where to open a new store or restaurant without cannibalising their existing businesses.

• Optimising an existing location. For example, companies can identify the right combination of brands that suit the demographics and shopping preferences of nearby customers or refine a site – such as identifying the perfect location for a new EV charging station.

• Understanding customer segments. Using the data, companies can find out where else their customers are spending money, when they are cutting back on non-essential spending, and when they are happy to splash out.

• Addressing customer attrition. If a restaurant is losing market share to other nearby restaurants, the business could use that information to potentially attract customers back by changing its menu or customer offers.

• Harnessing payday insights. Retailers can use customer data to input into a marketing campaign a few days before customers are due to receive salary payments.