IBM and Mastercard signed a deal for a new service that will offer smaller retailers real-time, analytics-based market insights on revenue, market share, customer demographics and competitors.

The partnership integrates Mastercard’s transaction data and IBM’s data analysis service, Watson Analytics, to help retailers understand revenue trends, customer demographics, market share, and customer behaviour. They would also be able to track the aggregated performance metrics of their competitor set via anonymous data.

“There is an increasing wealth of data today that merchants can leverage to better understand their market and consumers. However, smaller merchants often don’t have the resources to maximise the insights. That’s the value of this platform turning big data into smarter data that is easily accessible and actionable,” said MasterCard Advisors senior vice president Eric Schneider.

The service has been designed to help smaller retailers manage and understand their businesses and competition better, improve productivity and lower costs, said IBM Asean head of financial services, Yashesh Kampani.

The data will be made available next month, starting in Singapore, to retailers who accept MasterCard. They can subscribe to the service for a monthly or annual fee. The two companies plan to expand and make the service available to other Asian countries and the rest of the world.