How relevanC is driving innovation at Group Casino with an advanced retail Data Hub

An interview with relevanC's CTO, Yan Georget

5 min read

Casino Group: a retail innovator

Casino Group, the owner of high-street chains such as Monoprix, Naturalia, Franprix and Casino is a consistent investor in innovation. Whether in pursuit of operational efficiencies or improving the customer journey, Casino puts innovation at the core. For instance, Monoprix was one of the first to move its promotional catalogue from paper to digital. And Cdiscount, a leading marketplace in France, has been at the forefront of Retail Media, pioneering one of the best performing sponsored ads solutions in the industry.

relevanC is the data, tech and innovations arm of Casino Group. With deep expertise in retail data technology, relevanC’s mission is to realise the value of Casino Group’s substantial data assets with the goal of driving revenue through enhanced shopper and supplier experiences. relevanC also provides group members with operational services in retail media, retail marketing, and technology solutions for consumer insights and personalised digital promotions. 
Casino Group centralises its data tech and innovation efforts through relevanC relying on the retail-tech subsidiary to keep Casino Group at the leading edge of retail innovation.
Services and technologies provided by relevanC have one thing in common: they are built on a foundation of high-quality transactional, customer and operational data drawn from across the group’s supermarket chains which comprise hundreds of retail stores worldwide.

Key challenges for Casino Group in 2024 and beyond include:

• Gain a better understanding of what drives consumer behaviour
• Enhance online and in-store consumer experience through hyper-personalisation: personalised ads, personalised promotions and localised content.
• Provide an elevated advertiser experience to its brand partners by leveraging a highly qualified first-party dataset
• Creating efficiencies in logistics and distribution chains, to keep down costs and lower environmental impact
• Addressing emerging competitive business models

“We’ve created a unified data hub that gives Casino Group and its partners a tool that brings the power of data insights into every business decision the group makes. But beyond that, it provides us with the foundations for almost limitless innovation” 

relevanC Data Hub

To address these challenges, relevanC has built a Data Hub, a centralised repository for all transactional, operational and customer data across the Casino Group companies. The Data Hub gives Casino Group a single view of over 60 terabytes of data and with over 10 million lines being added daily it’s a unique asset that continues to grow in importance.
The Data Hub serves 3 main purposes. 1. It forms the basis of an improved shopper experience by enhancing the capabilities of data-backed services such as personalised promotions, 2. It improves the advertiser’s experience by elevating real-time reporting and analytics services and, 3. It acts as a platform for innovation both at relevanC and across the group that provides the foundation for continual optimisation across all areas of the business.

Data: a strategic asset

Yan Georget, relevanC’s Chief Product, Data and Technology Officer, heads up the tech teams at relevanC. For him, the operational benefits are important but it’s the potential for innovation off the back of the Data Hub that really gets him excited.

“We’ve created a unified data hub that gives Casino Group and its partners a tool that brings the power of data insights into every business decision the group makes. But beyond that, it provides us with the foundations for almost limitless innovation” 

A key use case is personalisation. Casino Group supermarkets leverage personalisation to drive store visits, increase traffic to app, and increase sales. By exposing the customer to hyper-relevant offers selected based on purchase history, demographics and geography, customer engagement increases. The relevanC-built data hub underpins personalised promotions allowing the AI algorithm to instantly interrogate terrabytes of user behaviour data in order to match a loyalty scheme member with the right offer. 

Challenges

According to a study by Coresight, “Data sharing among retailers and suppliers offers numerous benefits for nearly all participants in the value chain. Visibility across retailers and suppliers enables them to make optimal business decisions about manufacturing, allocation, inventory, pricing and other tough challenges such as managing returns”

So centralising the data across different retail chains and stores for use by the whole group looks like a straightforward solution to a lot of problems. Many retailers want to take this approach. The challenge, however, is collecting and then transforming the data into a usable form. Casino Group, like many large companies, has grown through acquisition. Each member company joins with its way of working, its own requirements and its own data schemas, all of which make combining datasets a serious challenge. With the Data Hub, the key to success has been automating the centralisation of data and standardising it without interrupting business.

For Georget, asking the individual businesses to change the way they managed data was off the table:

“With the Data Hub it is important that we don’t put an operational burden on the individual businesses” explains Georget. “If each business takes inspiration from what we’re doing to make changes to the way they collect data, then great,  but it wasn’t the purpose of the exercise. It’s the Data Hub that does the heavy lifting by executing the data normalisation on the fly”

The second major challenge is data security and privacy. As the Coresight study points out, retail is a highly competitive space and retailers are often reticent about sharing data. Yan Georget’s team put this at the heart of the Data Hub’s specifications.

“We’ve designed a schema that allows the sharing of data and insights while ensuring the protection of sensitive commercial data and more importantly data privacy. Now we can plug our businesses and joint venture partners into the Data Hub. Everyone benefits from the economies of scale. The schema allows a partner to benefit from our personalisation engine without exposing the customer’s personal data or product details"

A collaborative future

With the Data Hub in place, the Group has the means to collect more data, faster; critical for the training of machine learning algorithms upon which current and future innovations depend. And beyond breakthrough innovations, collecting a wider variety of operational data will allow the Group to bring operational insights in areas where finding economies of scale has been challenging.  
Group Casino is now uniquely positioned to forge new first-party data partnerships with retailers, brands and tech and media partners to inspire customers with unparalleled online and in-store experiences. 

William Brown