Will 2019 be the year of data economy?

S Mohini Ratna
Editor
VARINDIA

The New Year is a good time to start with new initiatives and reflect on what your goals are. India’s advanced public digital infrastructure, growing digitization, availability of data and growing digital payments are creating an unprecedented opportunity for disruption in lending to entities - individuals or MSME.

Thankfully, India is a data rich country. Our laws need to empower all of us to access and transfer all our data safely. Data about entities is captured by many institutions – financial entities, utilities, government agencies, e-commerce players, etc. If we are to empower each Indian to have full control over their data, then the law has to mandate each entity (public or private) which owns any person’s data to be obliged to share it with a potential lender electronically on person’s explicit consent. To safeguard privacy, a law has to mandate that the data once gathered has to be deleted once the purpose is served.

India is the only large economy with public digital infrastructure in the form of the so called India Stack another critical factor driving India’s digital evolution and its shift towards a cashless economy. A report shows that nearly 40 percent of Indian MSMEs are forced to borrow from informal sources that charge an average of 2.5 times higher interest rates than those in the formal sector. This sets MSME lending up for disruption and offers a meaningful market opportunity for both innovative start-ups as well as traditional lenders.

With all good things happening, it is not surprising that risks are also evolving with the growing cyber threats. Looking ahead, 2019 will surely bring an evolution of cyber threats, which continue to plague the world and in particular small to mid-sized businesses, which carry a disproportionate amount of risk and serve as back doors into larger enterprise systems. Additionally, key sectors such as critical infrastructure – or the commons on which markets rely – are massively exposed and woefully unprepared. Invariably, the New Year will bring new twists and turns in the cyber landscape, with some cyber conundrums as well.

The second most critical sector is the healthcare; 80% of all healthcare data is unstructured and for clinicians, doctors, nurses and surgeons, an incredible amount of insight remains hidden away in troves of clinical notes, EHR data, medical images, and omits data to understand patient records better. We are witnessing a revolution in the healthcare industry currently, in which there is an opportunity now to employ a new model of improved, personalized, evidence and data-driven clinical care. The healthcare faces many challenges, including developing, deploying, and integrating machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) into clinical workflow and care delivery.

Going forward, 85 percent of enterprises will use AI by 2020; only 25 percent are getting their initiatives off the ground now or are planning to start in the near term and the organizations need to understand that they are not just purchasing a product rather they are buying a set of capabilities that pervade every part of the organization.