SAN FRANCISCO — It came as an unexpected bombshell in an OpenMobile Summit panel titled “Big Data/Open Data: Where is the moneyin mobile data?”

That Wednesday panel covered much turf – exploring everythingfrom wearable computers to the struggles big-time sports teams havein mastering data analytics. But then there was a moment thatmattered to financial services professionals.

Panelist John Ahrendt, a senior vice president for enterprisedata and analytics at giant Wells Fargo, disclosed that when the bank did “patternanalysis” on its big data it found “125 patterns that are predictive of fraud aday in advance of the fraudulent activity.”

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After the panel's close, in response to a question from areporter, he declined to offer specifics of the patterns, exceptthat they represented anomalies from the established behaviors of aparticular account holder and, importantly, “a day in advancenotification is a very long time in fraud prevention.”

Even so, Ahrendt sighed, “There is a lot of hype around bigdata.”

But, he noted, “What new technology isn't oversold atfirst?”

In the panel discussion, Ahrendt added that at an institutionsuch as Wells Fargo, making sense of the data is an ongoingchallenge. He elaborated: “We have hundreds of systems servicingcustomers. We have to connect all that transaction data. By nomeans do we have a complete 360-degree view. We are still closinggaps. Our next challenge will be integrating online and offlinedata.”

As for mobile data in particular, Ahrendt noted that itpresented unique issues and, in particular, “(tracking) cookiesdon't work in mobile. The technology keeps evolving and alwaysthere is more data.”

Ahrendt added, “The term, 'big data' mainly is a misnomer. It'smore about unstructured data than big data as such.”