Data Portability (Part 3): Smart Data means Smart Customers - and a completely new economy
How Data Portability, Personal AI and Digital Wallets are changing who gets paid
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Each week I unpack the disruptive shifts around Empowerment Tech. AI Agents, digital wallets, Personal AI in and the future of the digital customer relationship.
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Customer Futures London Meetup: 22 June
Are you curious about Personal Agents, digital ID and digital wallets? Are you already working on Empowerment Tech?
Join us on Monday 22nd of June for our next Customer Futures Meetup, and a catch-up about all things Empowerment Tech.
Excitingly, we’ll be joined by the team from JLINC, a breakthrough data portability protocol, who are sponsoring the event.
We’ll be diving into all things authentic data + AI agents + verifiable credentials.
When: 6-8pm, Monday 22nd June
Where: Bar Area, The Hoxton, 199-206 High Holborn, London WC1V 7BD
Who: Regular readers of Customer Futures, friends and colleagues... anyone interested in the future of being a digital customer
Hi folks,
Last year, I wrote two posts in a series about Data Portability. It’s time for an update.
Because the UK’s ‘Smart Data’ initiatives are picking up speed, and you should be paying attention.
In the first Data Portability post, we looked at how the GDPR introduced data portability as a formal right. We saw how the EU’s Digital Markets Act (the DMA) transformed that right into something technical - and enforceable.
And how the Big Tech “gatekeepers” - META, Booking.com, Microsoft, Bytedance, Apple and others - have responded. Reluctantly, cautiously and minimally.
In the second post, we looked beyond data rights and infrastructure, and started thinking about participation and agency.
I introduced the idea that customer data doesn’t just need to move between large enterprises, but can instead flow to the customer themselves. Into data stores and vaults, into digital identity wallets, and into personal agents that can now act on your behalf.
All good stuff.
But today, I want to go further. Because we need to follow the money.
Data portability began as a story about compliance and competition (that was part 1). Then it became a story about agency and empowerment (part 2). But it’s now becoming something far more fundamental.
It’s a story about a new economy, and the empowered customer.
About who gets paid. About who captures value. And about what happens when individuals hold their own data, can prove things about themselves instantly, and have software acting on their behalf.
This is where we’re going in Part 3.
Because when that happens, and the customer becomes an active participant, not just a ‘data subject’, data portability stops being a regulatory discussion.
It becomes an economic one.
Today we walk through:
The uncomfortable truth: your data already has a price
Data Portability 1.0 was about movement… Data Portability 2.0 is about value
Today’s economic model: brands pay to stalk, not to serve
Three new money flows when the customer becomes the API
Smart Data is really about Smart Customers
The Great Customer Reset: when the money starts flowing back
It’s never been more important to understand the future of the digital customer.
So welcome back to the Customer Futures newsletter.
Let’s Go.
The uncomfortable truth: your data already has a price
Let’s start with something we all intuitively know, but rarely say out loud.
Your data already has a price.
Every scroll, every pause, every tap, every purchase and every moment of hesitation contributes to a vast digital pricing engine. One that determines which brands get to place what, in front of whom, when, where, and at what cost.
Want to know what’s being captured right now? Check out this page.
You see, platforms don’t need your explicit permission to value your data.
They can model it. They can infer it. They can auction it. Have you looked closely at the global Real Time Bidding (RTB) machine for digital ads? It’ll make you shudder. (Johnny Ryan calls RTB ‘the biggest data breach in history.’)
Entire markets now revolve around answering a single question.“How much is it worth to reach this person right now?”
This is the world we already live in. Where brands pay platforms for access, platforms monetise the resulting consumer attention, and individuals receive very little direct economic value in return.
Ok, we get some convenience, and some recommendations. Sometimes loyalty points. But honestly, it’s mostly noise in our day.
Not real value for the customer.
But once individuals can hold their own data, combine it with other verified sources, and allow Personal AI to curate and use that data on their behalf, the game changes.
Why?
Today’s question is “What can we infer about this customer?”.
But tomorrow’s question becomes “What high quality data can we request from the customer?
And:
“What does a fair value exchange look like when the customer is in control?”
It fast becomes a very different conversation - and a very different commercial model.
It’s where data portability gets interesting.
Data Portability 1.0 was about movement… Data Portability 2.0 is about value
So far, most discussions about data portability have focused on movement.
Can customers access their data?
Can they move it to another provider?
Can they switch services more easily?
Can they receive continuous and real-time access?
Important questions, yes. Necessary questions even.
But they all assume that the main purpose of data portability is to make switching easier. To unlock market competition. To allow customers to move from Brand A to Brand B with less friction.
Switching is useful and important. But it’s an incomplete view of data portability.
The better framing:
“What becomes possible once customers can get a copy of their own accounts and records?”
We now get to ask:
What new services become viable?
What new types of customer participation become possible?
What new business models can be unlocked?
This is where data portability stops being a compliance obligation… and starts becoming an economic shift.
Today’s economic model: brands pay to stalk, not to serve
Let’s be honest. Today’s digital economy is mostly organised around brands spending enormous amounts of money trying to guess what customers want.
The entire machine is optimised around:
Capturing attention
Behavioural prediction
Probabilistic targeting
…and increasingly desperate attempts to interrupt our social feeds, our inboxes and our chats
From the customer’s perspective, it shows up as an endless stream of irrelevant emails, poorly timed notifications, retargeting ads and generic recommendations.
From the business perspective, it is simply called digital marketing.
But here’s where I’m going. Empowerment Tech offers a different way of thinking.
Instead of brands paying to interrupt, they can pay to respond. Instead of inferring intent, they can receive intent. Instead of guessing context, they can work with context that has been intentionally provided.
And that is where we can start to follow the money.
Three new money flows when the customer becomes the API
When data portability combines with digital wallets, portable customer memory, data stores and Personal AI, three entirely new economic flows begin to emerge.
1. Trusted Data becomes a service
Today, businesses spend extraordinary amounts of money - literally billions of dollars - verifying, cleaning, reconciling and checking customer data.
Not because they enjoy doing so. But because they don’t trust the data they have.
Yet imagine a world where a digital wallet can instantly prove a customer’s:
Identity
Age
Address
Professional status
Student status
Entitlements
Memberships
All without exposing unnecessary personal information. Where every one of those proofs creates value. Every one reduces risk. Every one reduces cost.
Businesses can start paying for ‘trusted, high assurance data’ rather than repeatedly building expensive verification processes themselves.
A bank may pay for a verified proof of income. A lender may pay for a verified proof of employment. A travel company may pay for a verified loyalty credential.
And not because they want to ‘own’ the underlying data. But so that they can trust what they are seeing.
That is the first new money flow.
Businesses paying for trusted data and assurance, rather than collecting and storing (and cleaning and insuring) raw customer data that was wrong in the first place.
2. Brands subscribe to customer demand
The second flow is even more disruptive. We are already pumping lots of personal data into our favourite chatbots.
Right now, the AI Majors are getting all that vast customer data. Getting to know you better that you know yourself.
Pulling out rich insights about your situations, problems, challenges, questions and queries.
It’s going to become breathtakingly intimate with you - and not just about facts and figures, but about how you think, how you feel and your broader life context.
It’s not long before your Personal AI has a pretty comprehensive picture of:
Your preferences
Your budgets
Your goals
Your constraints
Your memberships
Your upcoming plans
Now imagine that your Personal Agent can communicate those needs to the market. Not your identity. Not your browsing history.
Your intent.
“I’m planning a family holiday.”
“I’m considering switching energy provider.”
“I need car insurance in the next thirty days.”
“I need a new laptop.”
Instead of brands paying to interrupt millions of people hoping a few might be interested, brands pay to respond to qualified, permissioned demand.
It is the difference between shouting into a crowded room vs. responding to someone who has already raised their hand.
Remember, online click through rates are typically sub 1-2%. And of those clicks (supposedly ‘qualified leads’), maybe 1% end up buying something.
Here’s the fascinating thing. In the new intent-driven world, branded messages that respond to customer intent won’t be ’ads’ anymore.
They will be more like hyper-personal offers, where businesses pay for qualified demand, likely as a subscription.
But all this only becomes possible when data portability gives customers control of their data.
3. Digital transformation on the customer side - new efficiencies, lower costs and and automation
The third flow emerges when Personal AI starts acting. Not recommending, but doing.
When my Personal Agent can
Switch providers
Cancel subscriptions
Negotiate better deals
Optimise tariffs
Manage renewals
Find savings
Right now customers can’t see all those opportunities. Because it takes time, effort, patience, and vast data sets across your life.
Precisely all the things AI - and specifically AI Agents - will be excellent at.
As customers start to save time, businesses reduce support costs, and processes become more efficient, we’re about to see a new wave of digital transformation arrive.
But this time it’s on the side of the customer.
Data portability won’t just unleash new competition. It unlocks a much larger automation economy altogether.
Will the UK get there first?
One of the mistakes people make when discussing data portability is assuming that this is primarily a European story.
But some of the most interesting developments are happening in the UK. Because for a few years now, the UK has been pursuing something called ‘Smart Data’.
The idea is quite simple.
Allow individuals to access and share their own data with trusted third parties in ways that increase competition, innovation and consumer benefit.
We’ve already seen it play out through Open Banking. What began as a regulatory intervention to increase competition in retail banking, has become one of the world’s most successful data portability ecosystems.
Millions of people now use Open Banking-powered services without even realising it. But look at it another way. Open Banking was never the destination. It was the prototype.
Today, a number of UK’ Smart Data programmes are exploring how similar approaches can be applied across other sectors including energy, telecoms, pensions and beyond.
They estimate that Smart Data can unlock nearly $100bn of new value in the UK alone.
It’s all pointing in the right direction, especially if we can see data portability through this new lens: of smart data, rather than just business-to-business data transfers.
The UK data portability agenda is on the move. And the Smart Data movement is worth paying attention to.
Smart Data is really about Smart Customers
Yet the mistake is to look at Smart Data through the old ‘data portability’ lens. About APIs, standards and regulation.
Those things matter, but remember, they are just plumbing.
The real story is what happens once customers are put back in the centre of their digital lives, powered by their personal data.
Yes, data portability provides the mechanism. Digital wallets can provide trust, and Personal AI can enable the intelligence.
But Smart Data provides the fuel.
Put those pieces together and the result is WAY more valuable than switching between providers. It’s the emergence of a new economic actor.
The Empowered Customer.
A customer who can betterunderstand their own data and situation. A customer who can prove things about themselves. A customer who can express intent.
And increasingly, a customer who can deploy software to act on their behalf.
The Great Customer Reset: when the money starts flowing back
Put all of this together and you begin to see the Great Customer Reset.
Today:
Data flows from individuals to organisations
Money flows from organisations to platforms
Individuals receive very little direct economic benefit
Soon:
Data still flows, but now under the customer’s control, and via their own personal software
Businesses pay for trusted access
Businesses pay to respond to verified intent
Automation creates new value that can be shared in real time, via the customer themselves
Look, this isn’t some fantasy world where everyone gets paid for their browsing history. It’s much deeper, more nuanced and much more significant than that.
A world where individuals become active participants in the value chain.
Not the product, not the target, but participants.
If you’re building products, designing digital strategy, or thinking about customer engagement, you need to ask a difficult question:
Are you still viewing data portability as a compliance cost? Or are you starting to see it as the foundation of a new economic model?
One built around:
Agent-ready APIs
Portable customer profiles
Verifiable credentials
Customer-controlled context
Intent-driven engagement
And entirely new revenue streams and customer value
Those who continue to see data portability as an overhead, a regulatory requirement, will keep spending money trying to guess what customers want.
But those who understand where this is heading will start building for a world where customers can simply tell them.
The DMA. eIDAS2. Open Banking. Smart Data. Digital wallets. Personal AI.
They might look like separate initiatives, but they’re not. They’re all pushing towards the same destination.
The Empowered Customer.
A world where customer data no longer sits trapped inside company databases, but flows under the control of the individual. And where the biggest opportunity won’t be moving data. It will be creating entirely new value around the people who control it.
That’s us, by the way.
The customers, the users, the consumers, the citizens, the patients, the athletes, the fans, the volunteers, and all the rest of us.
So I’ll say it again.
While data portability began as a story about compliance and competition (part 1 in this series), and became a story about agency and empowerment (part 2), it’s now becoming something far more fundamental: a story about economic flows.
That’s the real point here.
That data portability really needs to be about Smart Data. And that, my friends, means Smart Customers… and a completely new economy.
Data portability is just the first step.
And that’s a wrap. Stay tuned for more Customer Futures soon, both here and over at LinkedIn.
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