Sameer Rahman: Why Companies Should Pivot Their Business Models Around Data

Syed Sameer Rahman, Director of Insight and Data Science at The
Royal Mint, discusses how companies can start developing better
business models with data

Over the course of his 17-year career, The Royal Mint Director of
Insight and Data Science Syed Sameer Rahman has used data-driven
techniques to solve a wide range of challenges. One of his key
learnings in that time is that data is most useful when you look
at it through the right lens.


This week on the Business of Data podcast, we invite him to share
his views on why businesses must use the techniques to build
propositions that are based on data-driven insights.


“You have a piece of data and you develop your business around
that,” he explains. “That is what I call pivoting your business
around data.”


Rahman gives the example of Klarna, the ‘buy now pay later
company’, to illustrate how doing this successfully can allow
businesses to identify and profit from gaps in the market.


He recounts how Klarna rose to prominence using the insight that
the market for creditworthiness was drying up in the wake of the
2007 crash.


Its founders noticed that consumers still wanted to buy small
things to cheer themselves up. So, Klarna identified a market gap
– consumers with low risk of default who are interested in buying
things now.


He says: “That’s a good example of [a company] using market
insight, consumer insight and industry insight to identify the
market gap and to develop a business out of it.”


To achieve this, he says enterprises must understand the business
challenges they are trying to solve and build their data
strategies around uncovering these insights.
Syed Sameer Rahman, Director of Insight and Data Science at The
Royal Mint“The main barriers, I think, is really in understanding,
in data literacy, self-awareness and triangulation”

He argues that insufficient data literacy is the greatest barrier
to this kind of thinking in the business world today.


“One of the barriers really is the interpretation of data, which
is linked to data literacy,” he says. “We see, quite often,
people using data to manipulate data to get to the decision that
they want.


“A good data person will help with triangulation, which is,
they’ll look at the various different lenses that we have talked
about and then come about in a very unbiased way to a
conclusion.”
Key Takeaways


Data helps companies find their competitive
edge. Rahman says businesses should aim to pivot their
business models around data


Use the right data lens for the job. Business
leaders should be clear on the problem they’re trying to solve
to ensure they select the right analytical methods to solve it.


Promote company-wide data literacy. Rahman
argues that poor data literacy is the top barrier to
data-driven thinking in business today.