📊 Everything is a Data Business 2.0 - Asymmetrix Newsletter #90

Non-data businesses are increasingly monetizing their internal data - and what that means for traditional data providers

Nov 06, 2025

In this week’s newsletter, we discuss a new partnership between FTSE Russell and StepStone Group, Houlihan Lokey’s new private credit data product, and the growing trend of non-data businesses selling data.

As ever, if you would like to have access to Asymmetrix’s underlying content and data via our subscription product, contact us directly at asymmetrix@asymmetrixintelligence.com or via our website www.asymmetrixintelligence.com.

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Everything is a Data Business 2.0

Investment firms are data businesses

Last Thursday, index provider FTSE Russell, a subsidiary of London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), and StepStone Group, an investment consulting and fund management firm, announced the creation of the FTSE StepStone Global Private Market Indices. These indices will be derived from StepStone’s proprietary fund-level data sourced from their advisory and investment businesses, in which StepStone conducts due diligence on private capital fund manager performance.

The indices will be updated on a daily basis based on real-time changes to funds’ valuation data, addressing the market’s demand for data updated more frequently than quarterly fund valuations. Critically, the fact that these benchmarks are updated on a daily basis – a first in the industry – lays the groundwork for establishing index-tracking investment products.

What StepStone is essentially offering through this product is something that might be just out of reach for independent third-party data providers like Preqin or With Intelligence: a normalized and frequently updated database of fund performance and valuation data that is sourced from LPs they advise and GPs whose funds they assess. Given the size of StepStone’s business, it is also possible that this dataset is highly representative of the overall market and covers a significant portion of private capital fund managers.

StepStone’s collaboration with FTSE Russell follows an earlier announcement of a StepStone-Kroll collaboration focused on private credit benchmarks. Hamilton Lane, another leading investment consulting and fund management firm, announced a similar partnership with Bloomberg around private market fund performance indices.

Banks are data businesses

This week, investment bank Houlihan Lokey announced the launch of the Houlihan Lokey Private Credit DataBank, a proprietary dataset of loan-level data for private credit investment professionals. The dataset includes data on 60k+ loan valuations across geographies, industries, and loan types and includes over 200 datapoints spanning loan terms, credit metrics, borrower financials and historical loan performance. The data included in this new product is sourced from the firm’s recurring portfolio valuation work, which provides it with direct access to actual loan data.

Asymmetrix is a data business

…and we track the Data & Analytics sector, so we have talked about non-data businesses selling data in the past. When consulting firm McKinsey & Company announced the sale of wealth management benchmarking data provider PriceMetrix to S&P Global in September, we noted other instances where non-data businesses sold off their data assets, including A&O Shearman’s sale of aosphere to Inflexion and Endicott Capital and Corlytics’ acquisition of Deloitte UK’s RegTech platform.

In these situations, there was strategic rationale for these professional services firms to divest their data businesses, but we believe the overall trend is in the opposite direction: non-data businesses monetizing data generated through their business operations. These businesses – in whatever industry they operate – may sell data exhaust, or data generated during regular business activities, or data they have access to as part of a service they provide.

Everything is a data business

Asymmetrix sees non-data businesses monetizing data in a wide range of industries:

· Payments & Card Networks such as Mastercard (Mastercard Services) sell aggregated and anonymized consumer transaction data for audience profiling and advertising use cases;

· Retailers such as Walmart (Walmart Data Ventures), Target (Roundel) and Kroger (84.51°) sell first party shopper and transaction data for advertising and measurement use cases;

· Commerce Platforms like Instacart (Consumer Insights Portal) provide first-party grocery shopping data, such as SKU-level performance, search behavior and promotion impact data, to brands;

· Mobility and Map Providers like Uber (Uber Movement) and Waze (Waze for Cities) sell travel pattern and traffic data to cities;

· Logistics & Shipping Companies like FedEx (FedEx Dataworks) provides supply chain, shipment, and route performance data to business customers;

· Travel Marketplaces like Expedia Group sell traveler booking data for advertising purposes;

· Pharmacies such as CVS and Walgreens sell patient information and prescription data to pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

(Some businesses used to be data businesses but may never be again)

In 2024, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) fined four major wireless carriers – AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint – millions of dollars for selling customers’ real-time location data to third parties. Earlier this year, automotive OEM General Motors and its OnStar subsidiary were banned from selling customer geolocation and driving behavior data for five years by the FCC.

Geolocation data is a particularly sensitive and complex topic from a legal and regulatory perspective. If these businesses properly disclose their intentions to sell customer data to third parties and obtain customer consent, they may be allowed to sell customer data to third parties in some form again (presumably aggregated and anonymized).

Why start a data business if you’re not a data business

Motivations for non-data businesses to start a data business may vary:

· Revenue diversification;

· Reinforces client lock-in, offering an additional touch point with clients;

· Strategic value in positioning their business as critical information or infrastructure providers to the industry they operate in.

Why you can’t really be a data business if you’re not a data business

Non-data businesses that sell data generated through their regular business operations typically can’t sell raw customer or transaction data, whether due to explicit compliance restrictions or breach of customer trust, and must sell aggregated and anonymized datasets. Data products sold by non-data businesses also usually don’t look or feel the same as, say, Pitchbook, and are often only available to clients (as is the case with consulting businesses) or to advertisers in their ad networks (as is the case with retailers).

Another critical limitation is that data from non-data businesses, while high quality because it is derived from real business operations or transactions, is not necessarily representative. Even though Mastercard, for example, processes many payments across the world on a daily basis, its dataset is not a representative sample of all credit card transactions.

What non-data businesses have on data businesses

Limitations notwithstanding, data products sold by non-data businesses have a few strengths or advantages relative to traditional, independent third-party data providers:

· High quality, proprietary, first party data derived from real-world business operations or transactions;

· Ownership of data assets;

· Built-in trust and credibility as market participants rather than third-party aggregators;

· Natural distribution channels through existing client base and partner networks.

What this means for data businesses

There are several noteworthy implications of this trend on traditional data providers:

· When market participants can sell high quality data themselves, they can cut out syndicated third party providers, making them less valuable;

· To mitigate, data providers should focus on building representative datasets to compete with businesses that provide narrower slices of data;

· Pure play data providers should consider partnerships with market participants to obtain first-party data – even if expensive – to secure high quality data sources and mitigate the risk of disintermediation;

· Data providers should consider owning the point of data generation rather than just focusing only on relationships with data sources or data collection technology;

· Data businesses should build superior analytics or modelling tools to add value on top of their raw data.

📜 Interesting Content

Does Information Want to be Free? - Byrne Hobart, Capital Gains
A Fight Over Credit Scores Turns Into All-Out War - WSJ

If you would like to have access to Asymmetrix’s underlying data via our subscription product, contact us directly at asymmetrix@asymmetrixintelligence.com or via our website www.asymmetrixintelligence.com.