We’ve had an excited year in credit, with a brand new partnership with UK-based Welcom Digital, to resell their award-winning account management system, Financier, in South Africa. You can read more about our partnership here.

As a data analytics company, we write about data analytics frequently: but less so on the cloud. However, as software product experts, one of our blogs on a cloud-related topic was so popular this year, we would feel terrible if you were to miss it, and so have decided to add together our data analytics and cloud topics together in this roundup.

This year, we wrote about machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) mostly in the context of chatbots. That’s because we have a brand new relationship with NML as an Atura, AI Chatbot for Financial Services reseller. You can read more about our partnership, here. We’ve also written a very interesting blog regarding machine learning in medicine, which you shouldn’t miss, so we’ve included it in this roundup.

It’s that time of the year again: our annual roundup of top blogs! As always, we’ll be posting a series of lists of our most popular, and not-to be missed blogs grouped into our favourite topics. We’re starting with the top blogs which focus on collections and call centre topics. So without further ado, here are our top five debt collection and call centre blogs of 2019:

The call centre world, unsurprisingly, ranks as one of the highest adopters of data analytics platforms year on year. This is largely due to the invaluable insights we gain through the analysis of thousands of calls received each day by the typical call centre. With speed being of the essence in making the right decision at the right time for each caller many call centres are turning to machine learning to automate their data analysis and make crucial customer experience decisions within seconds.

In today’s world, running a call centre is more difficult than ever before, with customers demanding a high level of service and a great experience at every touch point.

Today, more than ever before, customer service is the most important aspect of your business. With all your competitor’s that your clients can choose from, you need to offer the best experience and service to keep your customers happy – and to keep them as customers.

Introducing our new generation of Principa characters, alive in a world of wonder far beyond the normal imagination, where anything is possible with data.

We have released a new eBook titled Truth Seeker: a guide to avoiding logical fallacies and cognitive biases in data science.

We’ve recently partnered with Atura to bring a world-class chatbot to the credit and collections industry – and we’re very excited! Your business is likely already considering a chatbot, and if not: you’ve likely got it on your agenda for this year. We’ve written recently about some powerful statistics on chatbots that you need to know, but in this article, we’ll detail some of the benefits of chatbots and why they are so important for your business in 2019.

If you haven’t yet heard, we’re in the chatbot game! We’ve recently announced our partnership with Atura and we’re very excited to bring the Atura chatbot into the credit and collections world.

With LinkedIn usage growing by two new members every second, you simply can’t afford to not be on the platform. Founded in 2003, LinkedIn has 590 million users with 260 million of those active every month.

Common barriers to success: Skills shortage: data scientists are in high demand and in low supply. Companies lack the skills to develop advanced data analytics or machine learning applications. Cost: recruiting and building up or training a team, as well as infrastructure costs are immense. Inefficiency and low ROI on: acquisition campaigns; re-activation and retention campaigns; outbound sales calls and debt collection. Resulting in: No or ineffective use of data. High cost to get insights from data. Low returns from campaigns. What’s the alternative? Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS): removes infrastructure skills and requirements for machine learning, allowing you to begin benefiting from machine learning quickly with little investment. Subscription based pricing, allowing you to benefit using machine learning while minimising your set-up costs and seeing returns sooner. Answers as a Service: Use historic data and machine learning to allow answers to increase in accuracy with time. MLaaS with predictive models pre-developed to answers specific questions: Genius Call Connect: What is the best time and number to call customers? Genius Customer Growth: Which customers are most likely to respond to cross-sell? Genius Re-activation: Which dormant customers are worth re-activating? Genius Customer Retention: Which customers are most likely to churn? Genius Leads: Which contacts are likely to respond to my campaign? Genius Risk Classifier: Which debtors are most likely to pay or roll? Benefits of Genius: Quick and cost-effective ability to leverage machine learning: Minimal set-up time Minimal involvement from IT Subscription based service Looking to make your data work for your business? Read more on Genius to see how it can help your business succeed. 

While LinkedIn has traditionally been thought of as the business or work focussed social platform, Facebook has been making headway into gaining market share in the space as well. With company pages and groups, Facebook is catering to every interest and aspiration that people might have – and combining that with their social interactions and news sources. Facebook aims to give users a one-stop-shop experience, and it’s very good at doing it.

Our final roundup this year covers two of our main topics: customer acquisition and customer engagement. We’ve not covered these topics in depth this year, and so decided to combine these two to provide a roundup of the best of both.

In our third roundup of 2018, we list the most popular blogs from our Credit Risk Management topic. Our credit risk blogs have mainly revolved around IFRS 9 and legislation changes this year, and have aimed to provide expert advice and insights into the current landscape.

For the second roundup of our most popular 2018 blogs, we cover the Data Analytics topic. The blogs that our readers love are thought-provoking and aim to inspire and teach – and we hope these articles do just that!

https://www.principa.co.za/contact-centre-solutions/artificial-intelligence-call-centre-virtual-assistant/We end off every year with a roundup of our most popular blogs – the blogs that you should not miss out on! This year is no different, and we'll be putting together four roundups this year, one for each of our main topics.

It isn't always easy to keep up-to-date with the latest news in data science, machine learning or artificial intelligence. Twitter is a great source of information and helps you quickly scan through headlines to engage with content that interests you. This helps eliminate a lot of noise and helps you focus on what you want to read about, but you need to follow the right people for that content to appear in your feed.

Meetup (www.meetup.com) was founded in 2002 and is an online service used to organise groups that host in-person events for people with similar interests. A social networking tool, unlike any other, Meetup, has more than 35 million users in 180 countries. In South Africa, there are many meetups organised for various interests. Of course, our interests span data science, machine learning and AI, so we took the time to put together a (non-comprehensive) list of the groups who organise meetups that we (and hopefully you) find of interest. We hope you make it out to one of these groups meetups soon!

We've been sharing our favourite machine learning books, podcasts and courses in the recent weeks, but we felt there was a glaring gap in the lists of resources we've been sharing: videos! Why did we think this is a noticeable gap? Because of these impressive statistics:

We’ve compiled this list of 10 people you should take note of in the machine learning field to keep yourself updated and informed about the field. It's also useful if you're interested in learning about machine learning, as these are the people who not only influence the industry but are paving the way forward and shaping the future of machine learning. We've given a short overview and a video to familiarise yourself with each of them, but if you're invested in learning about machine learning, follow them on social and start reading their publications.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are exciting fields, and we've been writing about these topics for a couple of years now. While a lot of what we talk about on our blog is advanced implementations of machine learning and can be overwhelming to beginners, the core concepts of machine learning are actually pretty easy to grasp. There are many resources and cheat sheets available online, but we believe the old fashioned way of learning is sometimes the best: with a good book. Few resources can match the in-depth, comprehensive detail of a good book.

Our data scientists are keen readers and avid podcast listeners. In this blog, we list a few of the podcasts that cover topics such as data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and that we’d recommend if you’re looking to start exploring the world of podcasts.

In this blog, we’ve created a (non-exhaustive) list of courses you should consider if you want to learn essential data science skills in South Africa. These courses are mostly classroom training from South African institutions, but if you’re more interested in online learning, check out our blog Where To Learn Essential Data Science Skills Online.

The value and benefits of becoming a data scientist or picking up basic data science skills, cannot be overstated in today’s world. Businesses across all industries are starting to embrace data analytics and those who aren’t will soon feel the advantage gained by their competitors who are.

Answer your business questions with advanced business decisioning using DecisionSmart scoring, segmentation and decisioning engine to provide segmentation, scores and decisions based on your business data, and Agent X call centre virtual assistant to display information visually for optimal call centre agent performance.

What is MarketWise? MarketWise is an audience of online users within South Africa which can be segmented and arranged according to a brand or advertisers target market. Online ads can then be served to this audience as they browse the internet.

A multinational luxury vehicle brand interested in promoting brand awareness through a display video banner were looking to increase action by improving campaign CTR at a lower CPC.

When we started on our journey of predicting the results of the FIFA World Cup matches, we set out with some cautious optimism. We had experienced success with predicting the outcomes of the 2015 Rugby World Cup and the 2016 Oscars, but Football was a whole new ballgame. As our CEO, Jaco Rossouw, said: “We’ve never used our skills as data scientists to predict the outcomes of a football game, and unlike with the Rugby World Cup where we were predicting the point margins between the participating teams, this time we’ll be predicting the exact final scores - a significantly more complex challenge!”

After a FIFA World Cup full of upsets, the South African data scientists at Principa outranked 99.92% of people on popular sports predictor site, Superbru.

South African based data analytics company, Principa, will be predicting the results of every match at this year’s FIFA Football World Cup, to once again put theory into play. By applying the same principles used to predict customer behaviour for Principa’s financial services and retail clients, the company’s data scientists are using different algorithms to develop models that can predict the outcome of the matches.

Positioning is one of the most powerful marketing concepts a brand has at its disposal. (Click to Tweet!) Whether you’re a luxury vehicle designer or a value-based grocery store chain, you’ve likely spent a lot of resources perfecting and cementing your positioning, on your way to success.

Geo-location analytics, or location intelligence, is a powerful tool for marketers, developers and businesses in general. It’s defined as the analysis of IP address data to determine a user’s location, which gives a great deal of insight into the user, their behaviour and opportunities.

Geo-location analytics is defined as the analysis of IP address data to determine a user’s location. With geo-location being the new buzzword in marketing, brands who ignore this powerful tool risk losing out on a valuable way of reaching new customers.