UK online retailer Shop Direct is to spend £50 million with IBM to develop personalised financial services for its four million customers.
Shop Direct is the UK’s second largest pureplay online retailer, with annual sales of £1.8 billion. The digital department store receives one million website visits a day, with over 63% of online sales completed on mobile devices. Financial services products offering flexible ways to pay comes as part of the package.
The company signed a 10-year, large-scale services agreement with IBM last year to move the multi-brand digital retailer to a hybrid cloud model to underpin the delivery of a suite of analytics, mobile, social and security offerings to its customers.
Alex Baldock, group CEO says the new £50 million deal with IBM will create "ground-breaking capabilities" that offer customers financial services products tailored to them.
"2016 will be the year of personalisation for Shop Direct," he says. "Personalisation is at the heart of making the shopping experience ever easier for our customers, enabled by heavy investment in Big Data and technology which we expect to make a big impact in 2016."