Cartao Elo: opening a new revenue stream and enhancing the customer experience with real-time analytics

Cartao Elo, Brazil’s sole domestic credit card company, processes more than a million transactions per day, which represents 11 percent of the country's payment cards market share.

Challenge

Elo aims to enhance the consumer experience by delivering personalized, contextual offerings--before customers reach for their credit card. For instance, Elo wants to send restaurant patrons promotions for specific foods or beverages they’d be interested in during the one to two hour window that they’re in the restaurant. This requires a real-time analytics environment that can ingest data from sources such as social channels or merchant beacons, signaling information about consumers’ live behaviors and locations.

Elo’s legacy data management infrastructure couldn’t provide the performance or scalability to accommodate these new data sources. Business users were limited to canned, inflexible reports, and if users wanted to view different or additional data, they had to go through the data team which was time consuming. They’d need four to five DBAs just to satisfy all reporting requests.

Solution

Elo is improving the experience of both consumers and merchants with self-service, real-time analytics powered by a Cloudera data lake that combines transaction data with information from cardholders, merchants, social media, maps and weather.

The data lake supports three groups:

• Operations, seeking to understand the volume of transactions and money spent with Elo cards.

• Product, helping to understand where cardholders are spending money so they can improve products and services for customers.

Enablement, looking for opportunities to expand adoption of Elo cards across Brazil.

“Even our Chief Executive is looking at this data,” said Mauro Sartin, database manager for Cartao Elo.

Implementation

Elo set out to find a solution that could handle the scale and speed of Internet of Things (IoT) data, while accommodating the seasonality of its business and stringent security requirements for Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance.

With flexibility to support both on-premises and cloud-based deployments, Cloudera makes it easy for Elo to expand and shrink its cluster as demands change--for instance, supporting transaction peaks around holidays such as Christmas, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

Cloudera Navigator provides data encryption, columnar encryption and access controls for data and users, simplifying the path to PCI compliance. This is critically important for a company dealing with international credit card data; Elo’s partnership with Discover allows consumers to buy items in the U.S., but without PCI compliance, that partnership would not be possible.