BBVA API Market
The information customers of a service contribute on a daily basis with their behaviour and their simplest actions is of incalculable value: thanks to this, companies can change their strategy to adjust more to what their consumers expect. Big Data can thus be a great help for companies when it comes to taking decisions.
In fact, those APIs that make it possible to collect user data have met with numerous successes and become indispensable for companies as diverse as Netflix, Spotify, the mobile game developer King and Amazon, the electronic commerce giant. E-commerce is actually one of the most benefitted sectors; according to a study, 73% of electronic sale companies that have taken up big data have detected an increase in customer satisfaction.
One such company is the US Macy’s chain. With a strong internet presence, it started to analyse its list of customers so as to, among other things, determine the impact of its newsletter. Like this, they were able to customise it as much as possible (they have gone as far as sending 500,000 versions of one single mailing) to draw all customer types. Besides, studying purchaser data helps the company to adjust the price of its products in real time according to the offer available and the demand of the moment, and even to offer customers customized discounts on the basis of their previous purchases.
However, if big data has proven especially useful in any specific sector, that is in music streaming. In fact, Spotify makes use of its users’ data to determine what is fashionable, create lists with popular songs and also customise the individual experience of each listener, suggesting music on the basis of his or her tastes.
This demonstration of the power of data analysis, which has also been put to the test by such other companies as Next Big Sound to predict the musical preferences of its users, was taken to an extreme by Spotify, when it had the audacity to (successfully) forecast the winners of the last Latin Grammy Awards.
For its part, the King developer has also undertaken a detailed study of how its users behave in order to create games that are even more to their liking. The creators of the popular Candy Crush made some changes to the popular candy franchise to observe how users reacted. The purpose was to make players (even more) loyal: taking into account the information collected during its analysis, King launched the following version of the app: Candy Crush Soda.
However, companies can not only benefit from the data generated by their customers. Big Data goes far beyond this. Thanks to the APIs of other services, it is possible to extract truly valuable information to develop new products or improve on those already existing.
Such is the case, for instance, with the Netflix API. There are many companies that have used the data of the streaming platform to create, for instance, websites with information on TV series and films. Others have gone further than this, such as the US company Plaxo. In order to improve its social network (Pulse), it made use of the punctuations each user would give to films and TV series in order to place those people with similar tastes in contact with one another.
This is basically the same as is made possible by the data API of BBVA, available on its open platform. Thanks to the huge amount of aggregated banking information on the customer of the entity it offers access to, any developer or company can, for instance, analyse the evolution of a specific economic sector or geographical area and take decisions from this – and all thanks to the power of the data.
Are you interested in financial APIs? See BBVA’s catalog at this website
Taking a customer through the entire buying process until it is formalized is an arduous journey and one that faces the constant possibility of the customer leaving. However, there are ways to make the buying decision happen if you are given facilities such as agile, secure financing.
In a connected world, APIs are the glue that keeps all the parts that form our day-to-day lives in place. The same way the power of glue depends on the material it is used on and the knowledge of its properties, APIs are only as useful as their documentation allows for.
There are different solutions to monitor the performance of an API, in terms of traffic, quality and speed of the answers it provides. Detecting faults in the code or quantifying the generated revenues are also some of the options offered by these useful tools.
