How DataCo is Reinventing Data Partnerships by Putting Privacy-Enhancing Technologies to Work

Think of all the great customer experiences you have ever had! Those unexpected business class upgrades or Netflix “on-the-house” as a part of your cell phone plans. What’s behind them all? Seamless customer intelligence. 

Companies today want to transform their customer engagement deeply and have a more personalized relationship at a time when loyalty is harder to earn and maintain than ever before. While the only way to deliver exceeding customer experience is through data, relying on a first-party data strategy or even buying public data from a marketplace is no longer enough. The drive to deliver differentiated customer insights pushes companies to explore new data sources that are additive to what they already have. 

One such company helping organizations accomplish this is DataCo Technologies, a startup that emerged out of ANZ Bank’s VC and innovation arm, 1835i. DataCo Collaboration Platform built with Inpher’s Secret Computing® technology allows organizations to connect and collaborate with data partners, leveraging the latest Privacy Enhancing and data protection to remove the need for data to ever be shared directly.

Existing Approach to Data Partnership: Long Cycle Times and Misaligned Efforts

While commercial data partnerships aren’t new, existing approaches are fraught with long cycle times between testing use cases and high costs per cycle. Most importantly, it isn’t easy to understand the value of a data collaboration before building a solution. 

After working with customers, DataCo recognized this problem early on. The existing process led to slow, or worse, stalled initiatives that rarely generated any value. They needed a better approach, an agile and an iterative solution that would allow data collaborators to validate the hypothesis quickly while safeguarding the data privacy and enforcing evolving consent. 

With the recent progress made in Multi-Party Computation (MPC), Differential Privacy (DP), and Synthetic Data, they realized that Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) and Inpher’s proprietary advances with Secret Computing® technology would be critical to building a modern data collaboration platform.

Reinventing Data Partnership Life Cycle with PETs and Inpher’s Secret Computing

PETs aren’t new. However, evolving privacy and data protection laws and growing consumer concerns have made PETs increasingly critical for processing personal data. In fact, Gartner predicts that 60% of all large organizations will use one or more PETs by 2025. 

While all PETs have their own merits, none should be seen as better or worse than another – there is no one-size-fits-all to data privacy. This is why we, at Inpher, built Secret Computing technology that leverages the complementaries of various PETs to solve a customer’s business problem.

Using Inpher’s Secret Computing, DataCo developed a modern collaboration lifecycle that provided an iterative approach to explore and validate a data partnership quickly before moving to production. In their framework, MPC became a foundational component, as it eliminates the need for the data partners to trust a third party or move the data outside of their organization.

After working with customers, DataCo recognized this problem early on. The existing process led to slow, or worse, stalled initiatives that rarely generated any value. They needed a better approach, an agile and an iterative solution that would allow data collaborators to validate the hypothesis quickly while safeguarding the data privacy and enforcing evolving consent. 

Additionally, to support rapid data exploration, they built a synthetic data generator that uses MPC to calculate marginal statistics on shared customers amongst collaborating parties. The advantage of using this approach is that the differentially private synthetic data generated is statistically similar to the real-world data, allowing the collaborating parties to explore the partnership without revealing any sensitive information and obtaining consent. With value demonstrated, and the use of data well defined, organizations can then seek the consent required and progress to execute use cases securely.

With the recent progress made in Multi-Party Computation (MPC), Differential Privacy (DP), and Synthetic Data, they realized that Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) and Inpher’s proprietary advances with Secret Computing® technology would be critical to building a modern data collaboration platform.

Secure Your Competitive Advantage 

There are multiple challenges faced by organizations trying to leverage the data from other enterprises, including data risks, being initially unclear about the value of partnership, and staying responsive to evolving rules around consent. The pioneering work done by DataCo technologies shows that there is no limit to how security and privacy mechanism, inclusive of PETs, can be combined to build a modern and secure data collaboration platform. Leveraging Inpher’s Secret Computing technology in conjunction with their proprietary consent management, DataCo is helping its customers gain clarity before making any significant investments. To leverage DataCo’s secure data collaboration platform and find differentiated insights, reach out to them at dataco.ai/