When data gets to be big data, corporations call IBM’s Watson. Watson gained world attention when the system proved it could search for unstructured data: data in e-mails, websites, books, and the news.

Citigroup hired Watson to make decisions on product offerings for its customers. The economist speculated that the bank will first use Watson for fraud detection and to look for customers becoming less creditworthy. IBM wants to make Watson a viable tool for businesses for offloading analysis work of unstructured data that is currently done by actual people.

Mining patterns in transactions is an important role for fraud detections. The systems used for data crunching are now a commodity. The result is that these system prices are dropping. Despite the economic and financial banking crisis in Spain, Santander is using big data analysis to be more customer-centric. The bank creates customer lists for its branches to identify products for suitable customers.

Financial management companies like Intuit are pushing financial analytics even further for customers. Mint.com lets customers aggregate spending and saving data for analysis. The information gives customers control on what products and services they might want to manage their finances.

Do you use mint.com or quicken? Do you find the tools offered by your financial institution will make you more likely to buy other products?

Further Reading:

• IBM packages crime-fighting, big data analytics 
• InfoSec 2012: IBM launches new threat analytics engine
• IBM uses social media to predict market trends