Peter Denby on accessible decision intel for retailers

Can you tell us about how HyperFinity started and what it is trying to achieve within retail? We started out as four retail practitioners who over time became increasingly frustrated with the usability and limitations of analytics providers in the market. We saw several problems, which were inherently linked; retailers were making inefficient decisions in silos, leading to poor customer experiences. At the same time, the companies helping them make those decisions were providing slow, expensive and overly complex solutions. On top of all that, retailers were fighting the chronic global shortage of data science and AI talent. Ultimately, there were no accessible tools helping business decision-makers use data science and AI to create insight for better commercial decisions. HyperFinity is here to democratise data. It's here to make decision intelligence, a combination of data science and AI, accessible to retailers. This started as an idea hatched in the craft ale pubs of Leeds, and has now become a successful, respected and fast-growing tech business. Can you tell us a little bit about your career leading up to becoming CCO of HyperFinity? I’ve spent over two decades helping companies drive value through data. My career has included working for leading consumer brands, data providers and innovative technology companies. Perhaps the highlight, before HyperFinity, was working for Sky. During my time there, I analysed customer viewing behaviour to support commercial decisions, such as what content to buy or make. That was very exciting for a self-confessed football and TV addict. What are your day-to-day responsibilities in this role? My role is focused on HyperFinity’s business strategy, marketing, sales, partnerships, funding, as well as product and service development. It’s an eclectic mix – one day I could be speaking to a client, the next I could be planning HyperFinity’s product roadmap with my co-founders. What services does the platform provide to the brands it works with? We specialise in putting data science and AI in the hands of business decision-makers, without the need to code. Our platform helps retailers make commercial decisions across six interlinked areas, which are product range, pricing and promotion, marketing and media, retail media, eCommerce and supply chain. These areas are key levers for business growth. As a result, we help decision makers create insight, then apply data science and AI to identify the best actions. For example, a value-based retailer might be struggling with cost price increases. Our platform can analyse the data and make recommendations to make the retailers ask themselves, are we marketing to the right customer segments? Could our product range benefit from optimisation? Are our stores stocking the right products? Are we forecasting demand accurately? How does the company use AI to understand customer and product relationships? In retail, everything comes back to selling the right products, for the right price, in the right place. Our decision intelligence platform connects customer, product and click data. The insight created in turn helps build an understanding of customer behaviour, including how consumers interact with products. In what ways have your services helped these brands? We’ve used our software to help retailers with a whole range of commercial decisions, such as customer nurture programmes where we helped a home shopping retailer improve engagement by analysing customer behaviour to create new, targeted segments. Our work resulted in an uplift in ROI driven by the increased engagement. Another one has been store segmentation where we helped a leading coffee chain intelligently tailor and target in-store food ranges, based on customer behaviour, preferences and missions. The project laid the foundations for customer personalisation and range optimisation. In margin optimisation, we worked with a home shopping retailer to protect margin, whilst preserving their value proposition. By using intelligent pricing and category management frameworks, our solution helped drive significant profit and loss benefit from cost price increases. Having secured an investment from Snowflake Ventures, how will the platform grow its offering in the months to come? Snowflake’s investment is an important milestone in our scaling journey. The retail market is constantly changing, so the funding will help HyperFinity make sure our customers can use our best-in-class technology to succeed in challenging times. It’ll also help accelerate the development of our decision intelligence platform, so that retailers can benefit from even more value. We’re planning to launch several new modules, including retail media optimisation, pricing and promotions, supply chain demand forecasting, and new data visualisation capabilities.