Uncovering competitive insights: How Open Banking data could transform marketing strategy across retail, gaming, and telecoms

In today’s data-driven world, understanding consumer behaviour goes beyond monitoring your brand’s performance; it involves analysing broader market dynamics to gain insights into customer spending patterns, preferences, and competitor interactions. However, many brands face challenges in capturing accurate market intelligence due to reliance on limited internal data, slow and outdated reporting methods, and fragmented customer insights.

Traditional market intelligence methods—such as quarterly market reports, surveys, or transactional data from a single source—often fail to provide a comprehensive view of consumer behaviour and the competitive landscape. 

Additionally, relying on self-reported customer data and small sample sizes can lead to incomplete insights that don’t fully reflect the broader market. This limited view can hinder brands’ ability to effectively anticipate market trends, respond to competitor movements, and meet evolving customer expectations.

Open banking allows businesses to capture customer’s individual granular transactional data for the purposes of assessing their incomes and/or affordability, this data can then be used to understand patterns of behaviour within the market with real data.

Let’s look at how this intelligence could empower each sector to make data-driven decisions that sharpen marketing strategies and enhance customer relationships.

Retail: unlocking the full story behind shopping patterns

With UK consumers spending over £200 billion on groceries annually, understanding shopping habits across the entire market provides invaluable insights for retailers. Internal data only reveals part of the customer journey, highlighting purchases made within your own stores but missing out on cross-retailer spending patterns and broader financial behaviours.

Enhanced market share analysis

Retailers could benefit from a broader perspective of market share that considers regional variations and seasonality. Aggregated spending data reveals where customers shop, how frequently, and their typical spend, helping retailers pinpoint areas to target for growth. This real-time analysis provides a clearer understanding of shifts in customer preferences and market share, allowing retailers to adjust their strategies dynamically.

Understanding customer value beyond your storefront

By examining income profiles alongside cross-store shopping behaviour, open banking data can reveal customers’ total shopping budgets and help you spot untapped segments. This information lets retailers understand who their high-value customers truly are—beyond what they spend with one brand. For example, if your "high-value" customers spend more at a competitor, targeting this segment with personalised offers can increase their engagement with your brand and capture a larger share of wallet.

Online gaming: tuning into financial realities to engage players responsibly

Latest statistics show significant sector growth. The UK’s online gambling market netted over £25bn between July and September, 2024 (the highest recorded overall number of bets and/or spins for a quarter since data collection began2) with intense competition among providers. To attract and retain players, understanding the financial backdrop of gaming behaviour is essential. Anonymised open banking data could provide a unique lens into player finances, revealing the broader financial patterns influencing their gaming engagement.

Competitive advantage through real-time market intelligence

With anonymised transaction data able to provide a precise share of wallet across competitors, gaming providers can assess market trends, player preferences, and competitors’ growth-driving categories. Imagine what your business could do if they were able to see clear comparisons of player deposits, withdrawals and win ratios, as well as how income and disposable income influences gaming spend.

Insight into player spending power

Aggregated financial data offers gaming providers an understanding of players' spending power, guiding them to create balanced gaming experiences. For instance, brands can identify high-income segments who may be interested in premium experiences. 

Telecoms: reducing churn and building loyalty through financial insights

The telecom sector sees a fairly high churn rate, due to consumers renewing at the end of their contract and looking around for the best deal. 4 out of 10 UK consumers suggest they are likely to change their telecoms provider, making customer loyalty increasingly difficult to maintain3. However, open banking data provides a solution by highlighting the broader financial factors that influence customer satisfaction and churn.

Preventing churn through financial patterns

By identifying financial patterns that precede customer churn, telecom providers can adopt a more proactive approach to customer retention. Understanding spending across telecom providers could help brands identify customer segments where new opportunities might exist. 

Real-time competitive analysis for targeted growth

Aggregated data provides insights into how telecoms perform across regions and customer segments, allowing brands to refine regional offerings. Real-time analysis reveals how customer preferences vary, enabling telecoms to adjust pricing, services, or bundled packages to capture more market share. These data-driven insights ensure that telecom providers stay agile, adapting quickly to shifts in the competitive landscape.

How Equifax can help

These are just a few of the key sectors we believe could benefit from more detailed competitive insights. This idea could apply to a number of sectors where keeping ahead of their competitors is vitally important.

We’ve created our Market Intelligence product to harness the power of anonymised and aggregated open banking data, offering a unique and comprehensive view of customer behaviour, spending patterns, and competitor dynamics. Helping brands make informed, strategic decisions that drive growth and foster long-lasting customer loyalty in an increasingly competitive landscape.

With access to over 10 billion transactions, Equifax’s solution provides unparalleled insights that go beyond traditional data sources.

By leveraging this intelligence, brands can:

• Stay ahead of competitors with real-time data on market share and customer preferences.

• Capture a greater share of wallet through targeted, data-driven marketing and personalised customer engagement.

• Grow your business by identifying high-value customer segments and market gaps, allowing brands to optimise offerings and expand market share.

Feel free to reach out to me directly if you’d like to learn more via andrew.hullock@equifax.com or you can download our Marketing Intelligence brochure to read about the different ways we are helping marketeers using data to identify, reach and enrich your ideal customer segments more effectively.

Sources: 1 Spryker UK Online Grocery Report 2022. 2 Gambling Commission 2024. 3 Oliver Wynman - Navigating Churn In A European Telecom Operators Landscape report 2023