Retailers need customer data to respond more quickly to changes in demand patterns, to reduce out-of-stocks, to match product offerings with customers who want to buy them, and to improve their service to customers. But customer-specific information can go well beyond transactional sales data. Increasingly, retailers are also exploring the potential benefits of consumer sentiment captured from social media, and with the emergence of the mobile channel, retailers can capture geo-location data as well.

We believe that while retailers continue to focus on meeting the mandated but narrowly defined requirements such as PCI DSS, the bigger risk – the strategic brand challenge of data security and consumer privacy – looms larger than ever for retailers.