SINGAPORE — DBS Bank has partnered with the Singapore Management University (SMU) to start a lab that will monitor and analyse data from five social media networks to anticipate what customers need, or to improve on products and services.

Publicly available data from five different networks — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Foursquare — will be studied by the DBS-SMU Life Analytics Lab (LifeLab), according to the bank.

In a media briefing today (Oct 26), Mr Sameer Gupta, executive director of Regional Business Analytics and Customer Experience at DBS pointed to the massive amount of data in the public sphere, which can be harnessed to identify high value customers, and detect new marketing opportunities.

“There is so much data that people are putting out there, on how they feel, how they are, what sentiments there are, what events there are. (The question is how we can turn) that into an insight that the bank can use to help improve our services and products,” said Mr Gupta.

For instance, when customers look at property purchases, they do not look at them as mortgages, but instead as buying a home, he pointed out. So while DBS traditionally focuses on the last stage - mortgage, now they can look at how to use big data to help customers with the first two stages, which is the property search, and then fact finding for the comparing of properties and amenities, among others.

Dr Steven Miller, Dean at School of Information Systems at SMU, said: “You want to understand how people are living, and future trends, and there’s a lot you can learn through big social data. Prior to this, the banks would do focus groups, or some senior bank executive would come to work and say, ‘I just heard about this at my church group’. But now, there’s a more systematic approach.”

About three regional projects have been identified, said Mr Gupta. While the joint lab is still thinking of a Singapore-focused one, a confirmed project will look at how to expand the bank’s consumer footprint in China. It wants to use social media big data to identify customers with an affinity to Singapore, and then reach out to them.