Ketharaman Swaminathan Founder and CEO at GTM360 Marketing Solutions
Darrell Huff's classic How To Lie With Statistics is as relevant today as it was when it was published 60 years ago. Probably even more relevant now because, as more data has been generated in the last three years than in the entire history of mankind, there's so much more raw material for lying now than ever before. Whether it's statistics or big...
18 December 2014
President Barack Obama’s credit card got declined in a New York restaurant. The likely reason, to quote Obama himself, was “…I guess I don’t use it enough, so they thought there was some fraud going on.” While this is the most high profile example of predictive analytics going awry, it’s not the first and it certainly won’t be the last. Many of us...
19 October 2014 /regulation
I've been asked several times about the difference between Data Mining and Predictive Analytics. Well, that's not strictly true. I've been asked only once and that too in the following tweet from @IBMAnalytics visible to me among 15.7K of its followers: https://twitter.com/IBMAnalytics/status/459004965298528256 Replies ranged from "depends&q...
10 October 2014
All of us receive spammy offers from banks, consumer brands, ecommerce websites, retailers and many other businesses. If you’re like me, you probably delete these SMS / email messages without even opening them. Once in a while, we get a discount coupon on our birthday or wedding anniversary. They are more targeted but, since human beings are condit...
06 October 2014 /retail
Like many, I’ve long held that nothing is broken with plastic cards for instore payments and made the case for mobile wallets to stick to gift, loyalty, ID and other forms of non-payment cards (see Mobile Wallets Should Fix What’s Broken – And It Ain’t Payments). Until I read about Apple Pay: “Every time you hand over your credit or debit card to ...
10 September 2014 /payments
In their diatribes about the underbanked, unbanked and financial inclusion, many fintech companies and members of the digerati threaten banks with the risk of losing customers to prepaid cards, P2P lending platforms, money transmitters, and other "neobanks". In their urge to dish out free, unsolicited advice, these self-appointed Saviors...
22 August 2014 /retail
Financial inclusion, banking the unbanked - call it what you will but, in a nutshell, the gist of these initiatives can be expressed as follows: People wish to borrow money only from banks; people wish to deposit their savings only in banks. But, since they can't access a bank, they're forced to dealing with loan sharks and blade companies. To prot...
08 August 2014 /payments /retail
There’s no shortage of studies about the hidden costs of cash. Take this recent HBR report for example. On the face of it, they all make a solid case for society to turn cashless from tomorrow. However, upon scratching the surface, I’ve never found a single one of these articles penned by merchants who are the biggest victim of these purported hid...
21 July 2014 /payments
I must be an "early adopter" in Running From Pillar To Post To Link Aadhaar Card To Bank Account: A year later, the early and late majority of LPG subsidy beneficiaries have still not managed to link their Aadhaar Cards to their bank accounts. But it doesn't matter any more. Politicians sensed that it was a dumb idea to tell people to pa...
11 July 2014 /regulation /retail
Security increases friction. That's not news. I've written a few blog posts - click here, and here - on this perennial tradeoff in payments. However, I recently realized that security measures can actually cause new sources of vulnerability. Ironic but true. Since December 2013, India's central bank RBI has made it mandatory for all debit and cred...
03 June 2014 /security
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