We sat down with Dr. Kanishka Bhattacharya, Senior Director of Data Science & Analytics at Publicis Sapient, at FinTECHTalents 2019, where he spoke about data, ethics, privacy and the journey of data management for the next 10 to 15 years.

Watch the video now:

Is data the new oil?

If you called it oil, it’s very much crude oil, at the moment. A lot needs to get into that, to refine it, to make it work. You still need to build the cars and the roads and the infrastructure and find ways of exploiting that crude oil. I don’t believe we’re there just yet. I think there are some pockets of large organisations and some FinTechs that have managed to get there – some parts of academia as well. But if you were to think of the wider ecosystem, I think we are getting there. We’ll probably get there in time.

Are we headed for a perfect storm in data management?

I often compare this to global warming. People are, buy and large, aware of it, but that doesn’t essentially mean people are changing their habits as quickly as they probably need to.

I think the reality is quite a lot of the data we don’t need to be worried about [in terms of] personal, privacy concerns at all. There is quite a lot of data however, which does have those privacy concerns attached to them.

I think we human beings are quite far behind in terms of being able to appreciate all those risks and what it means to us individuals and personal liberties. I think politics and morality and ethical issues need to come much closer to data, which is everywhere and respond to integral part of our lives. But I think many more conversations need to happen around that space.

I do expect over the next 10 to 15 years it will become a lot more topical and in the UK in Europe and broader. We’ve already seen some regulations, GDPR and others, which I support. I think it is the right way to go. We’ve also seen some changes in California recently and I’d expect more of that.