Big Data Analytics for Retail Recommendations

I love this example of Big Data Analytics at the intersection of Banking and Retail: 

Recommendation services like Yelp and others rely heavily on user generated reviews that could potentially be skewed by friends and employees and are a victim of detractors. One of the services that seem interesting is Bundle.com. Bundle is a personal finance startup backed by Citibank, Microsoft, and Morningstar. Bundle has built the algorithms to clean and sort “mentions” from 20 million-plus Citibank credit cards. Most services that I have heard of use credit card data for loyalty information or making personalized recommendations. However, Bundle uses aggregated, anonymous credit card data to rate and score local businesses. They rely on R for some of their analysis for its rich toolkit of statistical functions.

.