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An emerging financial model is
allowing businesses to monetise the
current and future value of data as an
asset that can be securitised and traded.

By David A. J. Axson

ccording to market intelligence firm International
Data Corporation, the amount of data created,
captured, and consumed globally is increasing by a
compound growth rate of 23%. By 2025, global data
A creation is projected to almost triple from 2020 to
more than 175 zettabytes (one zettabyte is equal to a billion
terabytes). Today, almost every event or interaction has a digital
footprint. However, only a small percentage of the potential value
of data is being realised.
Much of the data within an organisation is either discarded,
trapped, or retained in an unusable format. Despite years of
investment in data warehouses, data lakes, and other tools, rapid
access to clean, accurate, and timely data for use internally
remains a significant challenge, never mind creating data
products that have value in the external marketplace.
Revealing the potential
Advances in data management, falling storage costs, and the
emergence of artificial intelligence (including machine learning),
data science, big data, and cognitive computing are opening new
ways to extract value from data. This is done by unlocking trapped
data, providing structure and organisation, and finding patterns
within data that can produce insights and create value. It creates
opportunities for CFOs to unlock the value of data for the
enterprise — both for internal use and increasingly for sale
externally.
McKinsey & Co. estimates that the economic value from the
broad adoption of financial open-data ecosystems could range
from about 1%–1.5% of GDP by 2030 in the EU, the UK, and the US,
and as much as 4%–5% in India.

February 2023 I FM MAGAZINE I 9