Barclays Offers Big Data Service To Britain’s SMBs

Barclays is to help small businesses harness the power of big data analytics to gain more insight into consumer habits and spending trends.

From next month, Barclays’ SmartBusiness service will offer support to the bank’s 500,000 business customers, allowing them to analyse data such as average spend and what proportion of payments are made with cash, card or cheque.

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SmartBusiness costs £4.95 a month and will also track competing similar local businesses, and  how the perform over time.

Businesses that have a Barclaycard terminal will also be able to view customer insights such as behaviours, audiences, and spending patterns, helping them to analyse trends and create more intuitive loyalty or reward schemes.

“The time within which we can crunch billions of lines of transaction data is reducing rapidly, making new services possible for the first time ever,” said Peter Simon, Head of Information at Barclays.

“We want small businesses to have this data at their finger-tips as we believe this SmartBusiness insight can really help them grow their bottom line, make informed choices, and tailor services for their customers.”

The launch of SmartBusiness comes following research from Barclays which found that over half (56 percent) of British SMBs neglected to check their business data, with three percent having never looked at it at all.

The study found that many businesses find themselves too busy to check the data, which could yield important insight into their business processes, with a worrying 15 percent saying that they have never even thought to analyse their own data on transactions and customers.

“For small and medium sized bsiness owners, running a business is a full time job and it can be difficult to find the time to take stock and plan for the future,” noted Ian Rand, CEO of Barclays Business.

“SmartBusiness will help SMEs and aspiring entrepreneurs to both run their business by understanding their cash flow better; and to grow their business by understanding more about their customers. We want to give small businesses access to affordable market insights that traditionally would be the preserve of larger companies.”

“We are equipping the nations businesses with access to their own data in a form that’s much easier to use, and supporting the government’s plans to promote digital business solutions around data.”

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