Business Intelligence Success Story: Paypal

Topic Analysis

Business Intelligence refers to discovery of hidden patterns, correlations and other insights by implementing techniques, tools and methods that can help in better decision making. Organizations are investing in BI tools to help solve difficult problems and unleash new opportunities in the respective industry. It is possible to get confused between information and knowledge while analyzing large data. With use of new tools to get answers in short time businesses are becoming more digitalized, data driven and automated.

The main aim is to identify trends to assess events occurred in past to find valuable insights to predict what will happen in future. Common uses of BI in organizations are optimizing marketing campaigns, improving operations, Risk Reduction, knowing competitors and expanding business to earn value.

PayPal strengthens it’s market by using Business Intelligence through PayPal Here. The company aims to keep a track of its inventory through use of BI tools and processes that can help to restock without wasting more time. The company is planning to introduce facial recognition technique to validate payments. This will enhance company’s business thereby profiting small businesses and allowing retailers to process card payments from mobile devices. Through use of inventory management and business intelligence PayPal allows retailers to maintain sale records without need of manual recounts.

Face recognition allows to automatically analyze data and gain insights to expand and grow in business. Detailed reporting helps to ensure business is on track and ensures proper growth. With blended use of technology and Business Intelligence processes PayPal aims to provide more user-friendly experience for customers and shoppers such that they can pay for purchases of goods on app itself. This will embrace mobile payments and digitalization.

The company's progress depends on the amount of proper analysis done using big data and proper BI tools and strategies. The transactional data records of the consumers who purchase the products are kept in a loop, spreading them to different merchants. Leveraging transactional data could create high standards of information security requirements for the company and employees. Example: “Online commerce giant eBay asked users to change their passwords after hackers stole encrypted passwords and other personal information, including names, E-mail addresses, phone numbers.

Cyber attackers compromised a small number of employee log-in credentials, allowing unauthorized access to eBay's corporate network.” From the PayPal's example we come to know that any fraudulent transactions the company suspects should be kept on hold until the user who initiated the transaction is notified. Though being an inevitable part, sharing information on websites possesses a threat to customer's privacy which should be taken care.

Business Intelligence is an ever-transforming field and the scale of data aggregation and analysis is escalating with a larger magnitude. PayPal ranks amongst the top 5 payment companies by market capitalization as it makes use of BI processes and tools. Nevertheless, the ethical considerations and fair information and privacy principles should also be maintained. Applying ethical considerations should always begin with the realization that the decisions made based on the outcomes of analytics can have a negative effect on people, that certain information should not be collected for the purposes of analytics and for gaining profit. There should be boundaries and limits on the types of assumptions that can be made about people’s future intentions.

References

1. PayPal Strengthens PayPal Here with Business Intelligence | PYMNTS.com. (2013). Retrieved 25 May 2020, from https://www.pymnts.com/news/2013/paypal-strengthens-paypal-here-with-business-intelligence/
2. PayPal sharpens mobile payments edge with inventory management, analytics | Retail Dive. (2020). Retrieved 25 May 2020, from https://www.retaildive.com/ex/mobilecommercedaily/paypal-sharpens-mobile-payments-edge-with-inventory-management-analytics
3. What is Business Intelligence? BI Definition. (2020). Retrieved 25 May 2020, from https://olap.com/learn-bi-olap/olap-bi-definitions/business-intelligence/
4. DeZyre. (2016, March 12). Big Data Use Cases: How PayPal leverages Big Data Analytics. Retrieved February 9, 2019, from https://www.dezyre.com/article/big-data-use-cases-how-paypal-leverages-big-data-analytics/231