On a good and more favourable note relating to BRONTECH and Data legislation changes which are rapidly approaching which will open up major opportunities for Brontech , read on......
What are the legislation changes affecting data and how will they impact Bron.Tech? ] General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force on 25th May 2018: The EU’s GDPR will give individuals higher control over their personal data. Companies will have to provide APIs for their customers to access and extract their information, hence it will be easier to include other data sources in the MyBron platform.
The governments are doing this as an anti-trust measure in order to break the monopolistic power of the companies that hold vast amount of data and help increase competitiveness and innovation. Consumer Data Right (2018) In May 2017 the Productivity Commission finished its inquiry and published the report on Data availability and Use that advises reforms on how data is handled in Australia. Following the findings, the Australian Government will legislate a national Consumer Data Right, allowing customers open access to their financial, energy, phone and internet transactions.
This change will allow Bron.Tech to access additional data sources via APIs.
Describe Bron.Tech’s business model. What products/ services is Bron.Tech is selling? Interchange fees cap affects loyalty programs. The imposed credit card interchange rate (commenced in 2017) pressured many banks to drop or reduce their loyalty programs. This creates a huge opportunity for the Bron token to operate in a less crowded market and to be positioned as a ubiquitous reward currency.
5 Data products Organisations pay a lot of money to get insights and understand the market.
To derive these insights, they need to access large amounts of data. However, companies usually have information only on their customers and rarely on people who never used their services let alone customers of their competitors. To understand the people outside of their user base, companies are using third party services (data brokers) which are often outdated and not granular enough. Data brokers buy data from other companies in bulk (without the knowledge or consent from the people who created it) and resell it as insights.
However, many companies do not want to sell/share data either because they cannot do so (due to regulation) or because they do not want to (because it is regarded as a competitive advantage). Bron.Tech derives the data and insights directly from the users in the Bron ecosystem, hence the company can update the pool regularly, the data has the proper consents in place to be shared across domains, the data is granular enough to provide accurate insights and the company does not have exclusivity agreements with any major companies (i.e. can share data among competitors). Organisations buy aggregate data products from Bron.Tech at a set price based on the complexity of the analysis, amount of information and granularity. Typical use cases include: data products for overall market analysis (usually used by consultancies), dynamic segmentation, assessment of risk and factors of risk (usually used by insurance companies and FS providers) and neighbourhood analysis (used for real estate development).
Bron API for identity and personal data transfer Bron.Tech provides API for seamless transfer and verification of data from your MyBron wallet to a client’s platform. The traditional process of on-boarding to a service is the following. For example, the customer wants to get a loan from Bank A. In order to apply, the customer needs to open an account, fill in a long survey with his/her personal information and transaction history, provide the consent for the bank to access the information.
The bank then needs to do a credit check and verify the accuracy of the provided information. In contrast, with the Bron API the user only needs to access some of the interfaces of the bank (can be in the branch or digital) and allows access to already verified information with no more than 2 clicks. The same process can be used for getting a quote for insurance, accessing a fintech product, verifying your identity when talking to customer service (via biometrics support), etc. Training algorithms In the past people were building algorithms based on their assumptions. Companies process the input X through an algorithm A to derive the output Y. This is how most of the traditional processes work today including credits score checks, loan approvals, insurance quotes, etc.
However, human intelligence is limited in recognising patterns in complex systems. With the developments in machine learning, we can now use granular data as the input X and the output Y and construct the algorithm A based on the patterns that the “machine” has detected. A practical example would be: the company will use 10,000 Bron users to create an algorithm for loan approval by calculating the risk and the factors for default. We will use 70% of the data to train the algorithm and 30% of the data to test it. For example, the input/output pattern may show that people who are paying their phone bill on time are more likely to not default on a loan and that this pattern is more accurate than a typical credit check. The bank can now use this insight, apply it to their 1 million customers and ask for a history of telephone bills when processing loans to assess risk.
6 How decentralised systems improve security?
Blockchains are usually used to create a decentralised system i.e. a system which requires multiple parties to make their own independent decisions and no single party is in charge. Most of the organisations that are incorporating blockchains in their solution strive towards building a decentralised system in some way.
Hackers are looking for honeypots of data i.e. places where there is a lot of information about many individuals/companies. Let’s say that hypothetically we have a system with 1 million users. If the hacker wants to access the data of all 1 million users, he/she will only have to attack the single place where that data is stored. In a decentralised scenario, every user stores his/her data in a storage of choice (can be a personal cloud, hardware device, etc.) and they store the cryptographic proofs of the integrity/veracity of this data in a shared ledger (blockchain). This infrastructure will enable people/companies to exchange information in a peer-to-peer manner without compromising its integrity and without the need for it to be stored in a single centralised location. In this scenario, hackers will have to attack each of the 1 million users individually to gain access to the entire pool of data, which is not cost effective. As there is no single point of failure, the entire system is inherently more secure.
7 What are the implications of the interchange fee cap for the Bron currencies?
In 2017, The Reserve Bank of Australia imposed a cap on credit card interchange fees. Interchange fees are what credit card companies pay the banks each time a customer uses his/her credit card. The new regulation caps the interchange fees at 0.8%, while previously the fees could go as high as 3%. This indirectly affects loyalty programs as the banks are using these fees to buy rewards points such as frequent flyer miles or similar. As long as the cap is high enough, the bank makes both a profit and pays for the incentives for users to stick with their brand. These schemes create vast supply of data in regard to the purchasing behaviour of consumers. As this fee is now capped, the banks do not make enough from it to cover the rewards. Many of the banks started reducing the rewards that can be earned or dropped some of the rewards cards altogether. This creates a huge opportunity for creating a reward program that is not correlated with the interchange fees.
But what does this have to do with data?
Well, rewards programs are in a way data collection schemes and they are used to gather information from users in exchange for points (a digital currency). Data products can be generated based on the information collected through a rewards program and consequently create an additional revenue stream for the company. As Bron.Tech has both components in the core business i.e. data and a digital currency, it is only natural to launch a program where the company can access insights that are not easily accessible. In the past 2 months such a program has been under testing and will be soon announced publicly under the Bron brand. The rewards program is currently undergoing strong growth with a 6% daily increase in users.
By connecting the program to the MyBron wallet the company will give more control to the users over how their data is used. It is also worth pointing out that distribution and acceptance of the digital currency is the key factor for its success and is one of the main reasons for the company to take such an approach. This program will enable Bron.Tech to access more insights as well as distribute the Brons to many users with different demographic characteristics.
