Every industry in the world today is driven by information and data. In fact, without it, businesses can no longer remain competitive, and business growth is all but impossible.
Collecting data is one thing, and every business is bound to have mountains of it, but it’s what they’re doing with that data that’s the key to business growth. Through valuable transaction insights and analytics, a business can improve profitability, optimize revenue, cut costs and increase security.
In our comprehensive eBook ‘Now is the Time For Real Time’ we examine in detail the growth and accompanying complexity of the real time payments market. We highlight how the challenges and pain-points for businesses can be overcome with the right insights and information.
In this blog, we’ll focus specifically on the ways that real time transaction insights can drive business growth.
Leveraging business potential through data insights
To maintain a competitive edge, every organization processing transactions, from retail to the financial industry relies on having access to real time, actionable transaction insights.
These insights create a clear understanding of customer behavior and a continuous, concurrent and incremental evaluation of everything that’s happening in real time. This includes a clear view of how customers behave, their spending patterns and preferences, as well ways to offer them a superior customer experience (CX).
The value of real time transaction analytics
Depending on the type of business, real time analytics can be extremely valuable in many ways including:
- Providing real time granular data on where growth and profitability are declining and increasing
- Giving merchant acquirers and processors the insights to provide value-added services to their customers
- Financial institutions can check credit scores in real time to help make decisions on lending
- Measuring customer interaction to help businesses measure the satisfaction level of customers
- Targeting individual customers in retail with promotions and incentives to increase sales and loyalty
- Detecting fraudulent transactions occurring at the point of sale
How transaction analytics works
Analytics provides access to a mixture of traditional payment data as well as insight into what’s happening inside your payment system. By combining data about how your system is working, with ad hoc reports, this in-depth analysis can provide information to spur business growth.
When real time data is combined with historical data analysis provided by payment analytics software, businesses can identify the correlations between different points of data.
For example, they can see how the volume of transactions increases or decreases at certain points in the day. They can easily identify unusual bursts of transaction declines, which may indicate fraud attempts.
Managed data provides the ability to clearly see transaction patterns which can help businesses better manage their payments strategies.
The core benefits of real time transaction analytics and insights
There’s no downside to having complete control of your business operations. But having instant insights and being able to decipher your transaction information in real time, has led to data being considered ‘the new currency’. Here are some of the reasons why.
It streamlines the decision-making process
For many enterprise organizations, the primary benefit of real time data is being able to support decisions when and where they need to be made.
This wouldn’t be possible if businesses had to wait for data management processes to collect, collate and reconcile data. Business teams working remotely or internationally need information to flow continuously, and most importantly, to be able to see it in a dashboard instantly.
It increases business agility
Better decision-making increases business agility, but so too does the ability to follow through quickly on tactical and strategic business goals. This means that teams need the tools to empower them to quickly and directly make decisions that previously might have involved considerable management review.
Real time data insights provide the ability to create and implement strategies to respond faster and smarter to a changing business environment.
It quickly identifies and addresses operational issues
Many businesses today are facing rapidly changing markets and pressures, and profit margins are a primary concern. Real time insights can help businesses in any industry.
For example, in the logistics industry, real time reports on traffic and weather conditions can help with decisions to re-route delivery trucks more effectively. If trucks are carrying perishable loads, onboard temperature sensors can monitor for issues requiring immediate attention by sending real time alerts.
Businesses can also use real time analytics to monitor incoming orders, and products or parts availability which increases efficiency and customer satisfaction.
It helps identify and act on short-term market fluctuations
Some industries, like the stock market, are sensitive to rapid market changes, so real time data is invaluable to business survival in these cases. Industries like hotels and airlines determine prices and availability based on current events, oil prices, weather and other rapidly fluctuating factors. Retailers need to be able to respond quickly to customer trends, costs, international supply and demand.
The right analytics tools can help business growth
As we navigate changing times, managing and organizing the flow of transaction data requires a powerful monitoring tool that can collect data, analyze it and create reports all in real time. The right tools enable businesses to measure their services, view growth and transaction patterns and make decisions throughout the transaction chain – and across every platform.
What next?
Download the eBook ‘Now is the Time For Real Time’ for comprehensive insights into how the enhanced data in real-time payments is changing the face of global business. You can also read about how you can turn real-time data into insights that can help you navigate the changing payments world.
