Hansa Cequity to set up customer marketing institute in Mumbai

Company raised $4.5 million in a first round of funding from venture capital firm ASK Pravi in June this year

Mumbai-based Hansa Customer Equity (Hansa Cequity), a data analytics and market research company, is in the process of setting up a customer marketing institute to impart training in data science, technology, digital and campaign management, according to its chief operating officer Ajay Kelkar.

"We are in talks with various international universities for the same. The institute will be launched in Mumbai within the next six months," he told Business Standard.

Hansa Cequity, incubated and promoted by S Swaminathan, former national head of iContract, and Kelkar, former chief marketing officer (CMO) of HDFC Bank, in 2008, has raised $4.5 million in a first round of funding from venture capital firm ASK Pravi in June this year.

Kelkar said the company would utilise these funds to expand its footprints to key global markets where data-driven marketing was increasingly gaining attention of CMOs and chief information officers (CIOs). "CMOs are expected to invest more in marketing technology than CIOs. This will help us bring in cross-learning and global best practices across developed and emerging markets," he added.

The Nasscom-Hansa Cequity study estimates the business analytics market globally to be almost $41 billion in 2014 and is estimated to grow to about $67 billion by 2019. Analytics market in India is expected to grow by almost 22.8 per cent by 2019.

Kelkar said the company had developed a new product platform - Cequity SocialSmarts - which was now undergoing a beta launch with a couple of clients in the banking, retail and automobile space.

"Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Google+ have rich information that brands could use to better engage with people. Cequity has built an API farm and middleware to access these platforms. Cequity SocialSmarts enables the creation of an actionable database of intents for its customers by bringing together customers transaction data and their social behaviour," he said, adding that the product would be launched in the next three months.