Impact of big data analytics on banking: a case study

Purpose The paper aims to help enterprises gain valuable knowledge about big data implementation in practice and improve their information management ability, as they accumulate experience, to reuse or adapt the proposed method to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Design/methodology/approach Guided by the theory of technological frames of reference (TFR) and transaction cost theory (TCT), this paper describes a real-world case study in the banking industry to explain how to help enterprises leverage big data analytics for changes. Through close integration with bank's daily operations and strategic planning, the case study shows how the analytics team frame the challenge and analyze the data with two analytic models – customer segmentation (unsupervised) and product affinity prediction (supervised), to initiate the adoption of big data analytics in precise marketing. Findings The study reported relevant findings from a longitudinal data analysis and identified some key success factors. First, non-technical factors, for example intuitive analytics results, appropriate evaluation baseline, multiple-wave implementation and selection of marketing channels critically influence big data implementation progress in organizations. Second, a successful campaign also relies on technical factors. For example, the clustering analytics could promote customers' response rates, and the product affinity prediction model could boost efficient transaction and lower time costs. Originality/value For theoretical contribution, this paper verified that the outstanding characteristics of online mutual fund platforms brought up by Nagle, Seamans and Tadelis (2010) could not guarantee organizations' competitive advantages from the aspect of TCT.