“Data is the new oil” – stakeholders promise to leverage market data usage to grow businesses, investment

A host of industry stakeholders spoke on the growing importance of market data in growing businesses, and helping to make investment decisions.

During the panel session of the 2019 Market Data Workshop hosted by the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) in Lagos, elaborated on the message that data value continues to grow exponentially, and an industry collaboration is needed to make proper and productive use of data.

David Ogunshola, head of information technology, C&I Leasing, stated that in answering questions to drive businesses, data becomes paramount. He added that at C&I Leasing, the importance of data cannot be overstated as the company is invested in leasing, marine, outsourcing and so on.

Ogunshola said, ” There is a need to ask important questions and the questions need answers, questions about your customer, questions about advert, questions about consumer interest, all these questions can only be answered by market data.”

“For us, we make use of primary and secondary market data, and technology has helped to simplify the data into information, and we propagate the informations to be profitable and think futuristically. We play in the marine space, and we mostly service the oil and gas, and we know that energy is moving towards renewables so we are already making futuristic plans”

Uwa Agbonile, CEO, Infoware Limited, a market-data software solution company, stated that the asides from garnering data, fintech companies are working on functionally using data in collaboration with others in the value chain to grow the economy.

Agbonile said, “Data is the new oil, in fact, data goes beyond oil. Data has value in and off itself and the value is growing exponentially. The concern is how does the industry come together to make productive use of the data.”

Adeola Adenrelu, Deputy Chief Information Officer of Zenith Bank Plc., stated that data is life and the need for data is growing and needed across board. He added that data on its own is useless thus the need for stakeholders to collaborate.

Tosin Beredugo, head of technology, NSE, stated that he was particularly glad that so many people are beginning to understand that importance of data, he added that the NSE has partnered with various companies to monetize data.

Beredugo said, “at the NSE, the question we are asking is how can we monetize data, over the years, we have been partnering with different companies and investing in technologies with innovative solutions to give access to that data, processed and targeted toward market development”