Google’s analytics tools are being used by the Lloyds Banking Group on a project to analyse customer behaviour.
The project that will see the formation of a digital analytics team between Google, Advanced Skills Institute and the Lloyds group, will take advantage of Google’s analytics platform and tools.
By using tools such as Google Big Query, Data Flow and Big Table, the banking group will look to test the non-personal behaviour of its customers. The goal of this is to help the bank to better understand consumer requirements and to serve them in real time.
A trial of the project was run by Lloyds in-house team which analysed a year’s worth of front-end analytical data in under a minute. The benefit of this is that Lloyds are able to see a big picture of data in a very short period of time, which means that more in-depth answers to problems can be given.
Google’s analytical tools haven’t been the only ones that the bank has been looking at, it has also been looking at the wider market for tools in the areas of machine learning, the application of AI and advanced algorithms.
The bank isn’t alone in looking at and deploying these kinds of technologies. Last week RBS revealed that it is deployed advanced ‘human’ artificial intelligence to support relationships with small businesses.
MasterCard has also gone down the route of deploying artificial technologies to help its staff. The company is deploying an AI tool developed by Rainbird technology, the idea is to capture information and experience in the current sales system, encode its learning into a virtual sales assistant that can help sales teams.
The move to use more analytics to help understand customer behaviour is something that is being seen across a broad range of industries. Lloyds will undoubtedly have access to vast amounts of data so using an analytics offering from a Web-Scale player such as Google isn’t a great surprise.
The bank will be hoping that Google’s size will mean that it can deal with the scale of Lloyds data without any problems.
Reza Rokni, cloud platform solution engineer at Google said: "This is the first time we’ve done something like this with a bank, and it’s placed Lloyds about 18 months ahead of peers in the use of data analytics."
Lloyds has been able to reduce insight from around 96 hours to 30 minutes by using Big Query.
Google’s customer win with Lloyds may be its first in the banking sector but could potentially lead to more as the company eyes a new market opportunity. Its competitor in the cloud market Amazon Web Services, has already started targeting banks as potential cloud customers.
Like its competitors, Google is continuously working to improve its cloud and analytics offerings. Last week the company improved its Google Cast software by creating a software development kit that now includes dedicate pages for analytics for apps.
Although this update is not related to the financial sector it shows how the company is continuously working to enhance its tools to appeal to developers in a wide range of sectors.
