I write often about the opportunity for data companies to operate as central information exchanges because they have a central position in their markets, and this neutral market position makes them trustworthy.
Lots of sensitive market information gets exchanged through central data hubs. Companies routinely exchange credit data, pricing data, business metrics and much more. They do this because they know the data they submit will only be released in aggregate or anonymized form. As importantly, they do this because they need the answers that only data exchanges can provide.
This is why I got excited when I heard about a stealthy start-up called Crossbeam. Crossbeam wants to build a database that consists of company customer lists. Yes, they are asking companies to upload their entire customer files to the Crossbeam database!
Mission impossible? Not at all. Consider when companies discuss merging. One big, burning question is always how much customer overlap there is between the two companies. Even in merger situations, companies are reluctant to hand over their crown jewels to what often is a direct competitor. Crossbeam is offering to compare those two customer files on a confidential basis and report out the results, something that demands a neutral market position, and the trust that goes along with it.
You might think that this idea, while interesting, isn’t all that big. Think again. Crossbeam aims to be a business development tool for those in charge of partnering and strategic alliances. Using Crossbeam, a partnership manager can easily search out companies with a large overlap in customers – almost always the key to a successful partnership or business alliance. It’s an efficient, quantitative way to take the guesswork out of developing alliances, affiliates and business partnerships, because you know in advance you are selling to the same customers they are.
Crossbeam never releases customer data of course. It simply flags companies where there is a large overlap between your customer file and theirs. This is a wonderful example of the distilled magic of the central information exchange: companies contribute data that they would ordinarily not share because it provides back information they cannot otherwise get.
In the course of helping to accelerate business partnering, the other data and business insights that Crossbeam will be able to access are potentially staggering. Of course, Crossbeam also has the challenge of protecting all this sensitive data, making sure it can’t be used in unintended ways, and making sure it doesn’t kill the golden goose by mining all the data in its possession too aggressively. Still, those are manageable issues, and all part of the mission Crossbeam has chosen to accept!