The Sandbox is Datum Future’s inaugural initiative, developed in partnership with Datum Future founding members BNP Paribas, Experian, Meta and Publicis Groupe. It is exploring what steps need to be taken to innovate better customer journeys that help people address their needs and improve their lives to benefit from responsible data sharing.
The evidence is clear that being in control of one’s own data is a pre-requisite to people feeling confident in sharing information about themselves. This is supported by research conducted by GWI in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and the US, which showed that:
- When there are clear personal benefits and certain conditions are met, 90% of digital users would be open to sharing data with companies in order to address their needs.
- Those on low incomes with young families seeking to access rates and payment terms fitting their circumstances were over 20% higher than average to say that they were “very likely” to share data in order to demonstrate rightful access.Qualitative research into UK young families living in poverty identified relevance, control and proportionality as well as clear benefits as essential to building consumer confidence when it comes to sharing data.
The Sandbox use case aims to understand how people living in poverty can receive fairer and more equitable access to utilities and telecoms essential services when they can share their data in the knowledge that they have control over how it is used and that there is a tangible benefit for them.
More broadly, the Sandbox explores a new model that facilitates cross-sector companies to collaborate in order to innovate new customer-centric services, processes and value propositions that drive trust, broader access and value in data sharing. One topic to advance in this space is data portability – the principle that people should be able to take the data they share with one service and move it to another which can help to promote competition online and encourage the emergence of new services.