Financial technology company Facteus realized that you could not only anonymize but also monetize consumer data and use it to gain insight into consumer trends.
This process begins with what is known as Personal Identifiable Information (PII), such as your name, age, date of birth, address, and other highly sensitive data, which can be associated with your purchases. By stripping all raw data of this PPI to create synthetic data, Facteus created a highly valuable set of anonymized data for businesses to leverage and turn into revenue.
Facteus’ technology utilizes machine learning and artificial intelligence to remove PII from data sets and produce anonymized data sets, which bunch consumers into categories, such as age range and state of residence instead of DOB and street address. These data sets are called synthetic data and can be used for a variety of purposes, including gaining insights into consumer spending trends. To help investors and analysts make sense of the wealth of data, Facteus launched Enlightmint, an analytics tool that tracks billions of consumer transactions across more than 730 merchants and 270 public companies. The tool provides insight into transactional data, as well as the business revenue drivers and underlying consumer spending behaviors that drive them.
To generate buzz around the Enlightmint release, Facteus worked with RH Strategic on a product launch and a media engagement strategy. RH Strategic earned even more coverage for Facteus and Enlightmint by helping launch the Facteus Insight Report on Consumer Spending and Transactions (FIRST), a report that utilizes the same synthetic data available to Enlightmint users to provide data-rich insights into macro and micro consumer spending trends. As part of this strategy, Facteus and RH Strategic made short-term subscriptions available to journalists looking to understand and play with the data.
Results
In the first half of 2020, RH Strategic earned a total of 84 pieces of coverage in top-tier national and trade outlets, including Forbes, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, and Waters, the latter of which featured a Facteus exclusive. RH Strategic also secured a speaking opportunity for Facteus at Money20/20, the financial industry’s leading conference.
