In the wake of the global financial crisis "big data" has become a crucial marketing message for National Australia Bank.Speaking at Cebit's Big Data conference in Sydney yesterday, the bank's head of analytics and research operations, Antony Ugoni, said that such was the sway that big data held within the bank that "the ExCo [executive committee] member that we report to is talking about the possibility of the chief technology officer reporting to the chief marketing officer.""No (marketing) decision is taken without deferring to us for some form of analytics," said Ugoni. He added that: "The GFC was fantastic for us. Bankers were looking where to make the next sale. It's a good time to be a nerd."Big data involves the analysis not just of internal structured databases but also extends to trawling social networks, to conduct sentiment analysis, and to other external data sources that may influence or reflect customer behaviour. Early adopters believe it will provide them with a competitive edge, as the insights from big data are used to tailor products or services to match customer expectations.This year it is expected to directly prompt US$28 billion of global IT spending, according to technology analyst Gartner, as organisations scramble to install the infrastructure needed to perform big data analysis.Ugoni said that he would be very surprised if any of the Big Four banks were not heavily invested in the area, although he questioned the ability of smaller financial services players to make use of big data because of the scarcity of skills in the area.Greg Nichelsen, head of business intelligence customer insights for ING Direct, acknowledged that access to data skills was the biggest hurdle, but made it clear that even smaller organisations were still keen to exploit big data. Not every attempt is successful, though. He said that in one early foray into big data the bank had tried to analyse customer behavior on its website. After churning away for 12 hours, the model it had constructed revealed that there were two types of customer - those who used the web and those who did not. That model has been refined since then.It's not just the incumbents who are looking to big data for insights - financial sector newcomers are also becoming increasingly reliant on big data for customer insights.  Mok Oh, until recently PayPal's chief scientist, provided an insight into how the eBay payments subsidiary harnessed big data to track user spending patterns. Oh said that PayPal was now handling 70 transactions each second, which were worth an aggregate US$5,000. It has amassed data from its 120 million users and 100 million merchant customers, and was also working on systems to automatically match PayPal or eBay customers to their Facebook accounts.Oh said the scale of the data available for analysis was colossal. It was a challenge even for a large company to bring together all the sources of company and big data in order to properly analyse them for nuggets of value. Ultimately, it was Paypal's