Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Business Category
by
Raghav Negi
Roll Number
14P036
by
Raghav Negi
Roll Number
14P036
Certificate of Approval
The following Summer Internship Report titled " Identifying Signals for Card members in OPEN
Cards Business Category" is hereby approved as a certified study in management carried out and
presented in a manner satisfactory to warrant its acceptance as a prerequisite for the award of
Post-Graduate Diploma in Business Management for which it has been submitted. It is
understood that by this approval the undersigned do not necessarily endorse or approve any
statement made, opinion expressed or conclusion drawn therein but approve the Summer
Internship Report only for the purpose it is submitted.
Summer Internship Report Examination Committee for evaluation of Summer Internship Report
Organizational Guide
: Signature.
: Name Naresh Kumar Meena
: Designation Director, Risk Management
: Address..
: Tel No 9810880703
: Email: naresh.kumar@aexp.com
Table of Contents
FOREWORD......................................................................................................................................................................
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT....................................................................................................................................................
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY...................................................................................................................................................
ABOUT THE COMPANY...................................................................................................................................................
LITERATURE REVIEW.....................................................................................................................................................
OBJECTIVE.......................................................................................................................................................................
SIGNALS.........................................................................................................................................................................
METHODOLOGY.............................................................................................................................................................
CASE REVIEWS.............................................................................................................................................................
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................................................
FOREWORD
The project attempts to identify signals in Open Business Card Category (small business
category) and thereby leverage those signals for further purpose.
OPEN business division has been mainly created to facilitate small business and related
category spends. It has a significant amount (in millions) of card members in this
category and its products range from credit cards to charge cards with a lot of cobranded
cards on offer.
The objective of the project was to identify the signals which would help American
Express predict future high spend and transactions. Signals are basically defined as
transactions acting as a trigger for future transactions and a higher spend. A signal could
be a transaction at a specific merchant or a list of spends which are leading to future high
spends and high value transactions.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to thank American Express for giving me an opportunity to do a project in
such an esteemed organization. I would like to thank my organizational guide, Mr. Naresh
Kumar Meena, Director, Strategic Projects at American Express, for helping me out
throughout the project at various junctures. His valuable insights helped me in coming up
with quality output in minimum time. I would also like to thank Mr. Manoj C Choudhary
(Vice President) and other members of my team for their continuous help and being
patient with me during the course of my internship.
I would also like to thank the faculty members over the course of the first year for
imparting invaluable knowledge about various management aspects and concepts.
Finally I would like to thank MDI peers and alumni members for their constant support
and guidance that helped me clear my confusions and doubts regarding the Business
Analytics industry.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
There are various business categories in the American Express portfolio and my project
catered to the OPEN business card category products. OPEN business organization
division has been mainly created to facilitate small business and related category spends.
It has a significant amount (in millions) of card members in this category and its products
range from credit cards to charge cards with a lot of cobranded cards on offer.
The objective of the project is to build a Signal Platform to identify the card members in
OPEN business card category (which caters to small business) and identify the signals
(transactions acting as a trigger for future transactions and a higher spend). This platform
would help American Express identify potential future transactions and accordingly assess
behaviour of their customers.
A signal could be a transaction at a specific merchant or a list of spends which are leading
to future high spends and high value transactions.
At the end of the project, I was able to find few signals which had a causal effect in future
transactions and which logically proved various hypotheses about a small business and its
lifecycle.
I.
merchant, including crediting the merchant's account for the value charged to
a credit card less all fees.
Issuing bank: the bank which issues the consumer's credit card. This is the
II.
LITERATURE REVIEW
As Amex is in a business of payments through cards and other products, it faces a high
risk of default as the money is lend without any collateral or security and is a type of
unsecured loan. So, it needs to continuously monitor and evaluate the probability of
default of its portfolio to minimize the loss arising from it. For risk there is a separate
department in the company known as Risk and Information Management (RIM) which is
further sub-divided into separate teams based on the type and size of client.
I was assigned a project which was not of a typical risk analysis nature. My project
focused more on identifying signals and analyzing transaction post and pre trigger
transactions. I had to pull the data according to my needs and decide on a methodology to
identify signals and analyze those signals using case reviews.
III. OBJECTIVE
The objective of the project given to me was to identify the signals which would help
American Express predict future high spend and transactions. Signals are basically
defined as transactions acting as a trigger for future transactions and a higher spend. A
signal could be a transaction at a specific merchant or a list of spends which are leading to
future high spends and high value transactions.
SIGNALS
METHODOLOGY FOLLOWED
There are some key steps which have been identified to build the signal platform and
identify the trigger transactions.
Identifying all the card members in OPEN card business category
Finding all the transactions of these spenders over a given period of time
Calculating Post and Pre transaction spend of each of these transactions by keeping a moving
window of a particular time frame
CASE REVIEWS
Using the above methodology, some signals were identified. These signals majorly
belonged to Go to Internet category (web hosting, domain services, online marketing),
Business permissions and architects or cost estimators. Using these signals, some more
related signals were identified using deep learning process and unsupervised methods
from Big Data Labs of American Express in Bangalore.
For each case review, Pre and Post analysis was done on each merchant. Lift was
calculated for customers transacting during a particular period and typical industry and
merchants where cardmembers transacted were analyzed. This was an important step in
signal validation process.
REFERENCES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Express
http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/925-keyword-buying-signals.html
Internal resources of American Express