Are data brokers and infrastructure providers changing their platforms?

For any organization holding its customer’s personal data, GDPR and CCPA have upped the ante on Privacy. The big question for marketing and product leaders is ‘How can privacy be profitable?‘

Chasing the goal of profitability through privacy, I curated the Privacy Conference at Web Summit 2019. I attended sessions relevant to privacy seeking answers.

Both data brokers and infrastructure providers have a critical role to play in shifting business models towards profitability and privacy. Businesses rely on their platforms and will build on top of the embedded privacy practices. I attended to presentations to understand the mindset with respect to personal data, privacy and algorithmic bias. For the broker, data is still very much a commodity to be acquired and traded, while the infrastructure vendor demonstrated a deep understanding of the need to design self-sovereign identity as a pre-cursor to privacy.

Experian: Experian’s approach to data innovation

Jonathan Westley, Experian CDO spoke on the approach to data innovation, to help bring credit to the underbanked. “Today Experian in the UK processes, over 14 million transactions a month, through the open banking infrastructure. And we believe by opening up the open data and opening up this channel, we would be able to address, another 1.5 million consumers. And it’s being driven by two key initiatives. The first one is consumer personalization, that consumers want personalized services in a digital world. And we’re also recognizing that the regulator is starting to see that a free flowing of data in the financial market, not only benefits the consumer but actually benefits the economy substantially. And as we know there are three new regulations that are coming into the financial market that of the payment service directories, you probably have heard of PSD2. [..] Our next stage for Experian, is that we’re actually going to reach out to customers, to consumers, to individuals, and we’re going to ask them to supply their own data into the repository, that they verify the data and the data is verified as it comes in, but they will be able to add information to their credit files, and they will be able to improve their scores. So individuals will be able to build their own information about themselves that they will then be able to share with financial organizations.”

I was disappointed that there was no acknowledgement of the credit score being the cause of financial invisibility. There was no mention of privacy or importantly the responsibility to manage algorithmic bias in the key credit scoring algorithms, it simply perpetuated the problems we have today.

RSA Security: The future of digital identity in the era of digital transformation

Zulfikar Ramzan CTO of RSA security spoke on The Future of Digital Identity in the Era of Digital Transformation, “… these three fundamental problems identity assurance access assurance and activity assurance, are the creek political legs of the stool when it comes to managing modern digital identities. [..] More recently, we’ve seen this concept evolve beyond just individuals to identities and things. Think about the whole notion of IoT, and the fact that an IoT device may potentially make a transaction, on behalf of its owner, without involving that owner, specifically in the course of that transaction. so for example imagine a world where your smart refrigerator can detect that you’re running low on milk and can make a transaction on your behalf to order milk for you. In some ways what you’ve done here is delegated authority to a device, and that device in turn can handle various transactions for you.[..] identity and access management it’s not about any individual technology alone. It’s about integrating that technology into your existing ecosystem into how you do integrated risk management, or how you think about your security operations center. Because ultimately, if you could do that I think you’d be very successful.”

For our digital lives, identity management has imperceptibly become the way that we are able to exist, relate and transact online. The identity management industry has supported us thus far. Moving forwards, our digital selves become more important, also the digital personas of the connected devices we own and interact with are generating critical and sometimes sensitive data. The technology to secure and protect those digital personas is already available and the vendor is wise to a very big picture.

Back to Web Summit 2019 – The Privacy Track

Next Steps For Marketers

As a marketer, your job is to create and nurture product markets. Data has been incredibly effective in enabling this, yet without regulation has created paths to exploitation and bad actors. New regulations put a throttle on current customer acquisition practices and engagement models. Yet there is an opportunity right now to turn this constraint into competitive advantage. Here are 6 steps to move to a privacy-for-profit model.

First build trust

1. Implement Governance: establish an actual operation model for governance that goes beyond compliance.
2. Offer Transparency: ensure that your current customers gain transparency into how their data is used and the benefit they receive.
3. Enable Control: give them some means of control, there are many third party solutions that could be leveraged.

Then find profit

1. Determine Value Proposition: what are new propositions that can be created out of consent. What are the data products, what is the consumer offer?
2. Create the Value Chain: what is the data value chain required to deliver a profitable business. How do we create a data mobility infrastructure and work with partners to create new value?
3. Make it Scale: how can the profitability grow as that proposition scales? What are the business models and data value projections that will justify investment?

3 Points Digital’s Personal Data and Privacy practice will help you find the profit model in your privacy preparations. We provide interim Chief Data Officers and frameworks for Governance, Transparency and Control.

Web Summit Videos

Experian’s approach to data innovation. Jonathan Westley, Experian

The future of digital identity in the era of digital transformation Zulfikar Ramzan, RSA Security