Stop selling data.
Sell insights.

Perhaps surprisingly, the answer to this first question is almost always no. While you may have considered the regulatory, customer, and headline risks, what you may not have thought through is this: What does someone want from my data in the first place? In the vast majority of cases a data consumer wants the statistical insights from your data rather than the data itself. If this is true, we can actually bring solutions to bear that allow even the most sensitive data to be analyzed without any risk of data exfiltration or exposure. Change your mindset: you are selling insights, not data.

For example a population health company that is subject to HIPAA partnered with LeapYear to monetize insights from their data to institutional asset managers in a fully compliant, safe, and secure manner – and generating new high margin revenue for that effort.

In this question, the word “unique” can be replaced with “valuable”. But consider a more pointed question: “Is my data valuable to systematic or ‘quant’ investors”? This community represents the vast majority of data consumers (people who will pay for insights) in the Alternative Data ecosystem. The good news is that there are specific and detailed considerations that will give clear guidance as to whether your data is unique, and by proxy valuable. If you’d like to review these considerations, download our guide on “What makes data valuable to systematic investors” here.

This is why we’re all here. If you are comfortable with the idea of safely monetizing your data, and you’ve determined there is potential value to data consumers, the next question is how much value? This question requires a good amount of diligence to correctly answer. The good news is that your data’s value can and should be determined before any significant investments are made to activate monetization programs. If you are working with someone who can’t, or won’t, help you do the legwork to estimate the monetary potential, you should be looking for different partners.

Working with sensitive data is not trivial. The right combination of capability to monetize data and meeting a clients’ risk tolerance has historically proven hard to implement. Most approaches either significantly devalue your data, expose you to risk, or both. The risks are real. No amount of incremental revenue is worth landing in the headlines or losing customers due to privacy or regulatory infringement. Our customers bring us into their monetization efforts to ensure highest possible value capture with lowest possible risk. LeapYear’s Data Monetization Solution, based on our patented privacy algorithms, is transforming how sensitive data is shared with the Alternative Data market.