MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Why Smart Companies Are Giving Customers More Data

Companies are discovering the benefits of data wrapping — packaging their products with data analytics features and experiences that delight customers and increase profitability.

In 2016, Spanish banking group BBVA offered to its Spain-based customers a personal finance management app. One of the app’s tools used machine learning algorithms to sort customer transactions into common budgeting categories such as rent, food, and entertainment, and then it displayed a customer’s expenditures broken down as a simple chart. BBVA promoted the categorizer on its digital banking website as a way for customers to better manage their personal budgets. In just a year and a half, the tool became the most utilized feature on the BBVA website, second only to funds transfer.

About the Author

Barbara H. Wixom (@barbwixom) is a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ronny M. Schüritz (@ronnyms) is cofounder and co-CEO of the AI startup prenode and a senior research adviser and lecturer at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Killian Farrell (@barbwixom) is a graduate student in business analytics at the MIT Operations Research Center.

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