Data Drivers

The rising cost of fuel isn’t keep drivers off the road this summer, GasBuddy CEO Sarah McCrary tells Karen Webster in this episode of Data Drivers - but it has made them more driven to find the best deal per gallon than ever. But while price is a powerful lever, McCrary noted, there’s only so low operators can go. Which means when thinking about mobile and how to leverage it, the question operators need to answer is how they can create more real touch-points with their buyers - and use those to build real loyalty.

In this episode of Data Drivers, Wirecard’s General Counsel and VP of Compliance and Governmental Affairs muses to Karen Webster that one button to rule them all may be no mere fantasy — it’s just a ways off.

EMV has done wonders to stop fraud via cards at the physical point of sale. The bad buys have moved off the premises and onto the web in due course, which means separating the good transactions for the ill-intentioned ones has gotten a whole lot harder. Featurespace Chief Strategy Officer Matt Mills says in this episode of Data Drivers that real time machine learning can take guesswork out of the equation.

Beyond Uber and Lyft, the gig economy is evolving, with a long tail that places value on plugging gaps in firms' skill sets, boosting gig workers' discretionary spend, too. Hyperwallet SVP of Digital Markets Michael Ting tells Karen Webster in this episode of Data Drivers that the value of the online marketplace lies in matching services and the firms that need them -- and making sure payment is seamless.

Data makes the world go round and CFOs are inundated with all different types of information. The key to making sense of all the data points that stream in from myriad sources, Coupa CFO Todd Ford tells Karen Webster in this episode of Data Drivers, is collaboration across far-flung units within the firm. No easy task when 66 percent of finance professionals do not have visibility into transactions.

Top performing FIs foster a culture of innovation that helps them lead the way in customer relationships – the sticky kind, as noted this episode of Data Drivers. Technology is part of the equation (and so are sandboxes), i2c’s Lisa Fugate, VP of Product Management tells Karen Webster, but mindset matters. The time is right for laggards to take a look at what they do beyond the obvious arenas of P2P, digital and mobile.

Financial stress costs employers $300 billion in lost employee productivity. And in the case of one desperate employee, her job when not having the money to buy her daughters medicine drove her to steal money from the company. That story built a company, FinFit, and President David Kilby and Karen Webster use three other data points to explain how 100,000 employers are using financial wellness platforms - including short term loans - to help employees get financially fit.

After 18 months of depressing headlines on this subject, it would be easy to give up on workplace ethics. But Pat Harned, Ethics and Compliance Initiative CEO, thinks there is some room for some (qualified) optimism. And a lot of work left to do.

By the time consumers are transfered to a call center agent, things have escalated to the point where chatbots have the answers - and a helping human hand is needed. Yet friction abounds where 70 percent of call centers require consumers to read off the same data multiple times, putting information (and frayed tempers) at risk. IntraNext CEO Patrick Brown says there's no magic bullet in the tradeoff between security and consumer experience, but technology (such as biometrics) helps, a bit.

https://www.pymnts.com/news/2018/for-call-centers-searching-for-the-seventy-percent-solution/

Hyperwallet SVP Michael Ting weighs in on the evolving landscape for gig workers – and the fact that when it comes to getting paid, employees want faster payments, but not added fees.