Financial Modelling Podcast

08/06/2026

Part of the reason for my involvement in the Ivy AI fund is my fascination with the AI ecosystem.

20/05/2026

Agentic AI doesn't need better models, it needs better data to act on.

Everyone's talking about AI agents that can reason, plan, and execute but an agent is only as good as the data it's working with.

The companies that will win the agentic era are the ones supplying the best data to feed them.

That's the next frontier of data monetisation.

🌳 alternata.io

14/05/2026

You can spend $10m building a data product worth $50m to the right buyer or $10m on something nobody will pay for.

Cost tells you nothing about price and most enterprise data leaders are still pricing like it does.
New episode of The Data Monetisation Podcast is out. 11 minutes on how to actually price, package and sell a data product.

11/05/2026

You don't need a data strategy. You need a data deal.

Maturity assessments, capability roadmaps, beautiful slide decks. Revenue generated: zero.

A buyer who's said yes. A pricing model. A signed contract. That's what actually moves the needle.

Stop strategising. Start dealing.

🌳 alternata.io

07/05/2026

Six SA banks and one number that tells you where the next decade of growth lives.

Non-interest revenue as a percentage of total income, FY25:

: 53.9%
: 42.0%
: 39.1%
: 38.0%
: 37.7%southafrica : 36.0%

This is the data monetisation league table (whether the banks call it that or not).

Every transaction fee, insurance cross-sell, VAS purchase and rewards redemption is a data rich event that compounds. The higher the NIR ratio, the more the franchise is being monetised through customer behaviour rather than balance sheet spread.

FNB and FirstRand have been demonstrating this for years. Ebucks turned FNB's transactional data into one of the most sophisticated loyalty engines on the continent and it shows up in the numbers!

Standard Bank's UCount programme plays a similar role and the data foundation is clearly there. Now we wait to see how aggressively it gets commercialised in the next strategy cycle.

Capitec is the outlier at 53.9% because they built VAS, Capitec Connect and an inhouse insurance licence as primary product lines (not as add-ons). The more your customers transact, the more your data assets compound.

The real opportunity isn't catching Capitec on ratio, but rather recognising that the data already flowing through these platforms is the most under monetised asset on the balance sheet.

That's the gap we work on every day at Alternata.

→ alternata.io

05/05/2026

Data monetisation doesn't fail because the data isn't valuable.

It fails because nobody owns the P&L.

Mandate + Ownership = Revenue.

🌳 alternata.io

02/05/2026

Nobody gets fired for building another dashboard. That's the problem.

47 dashboards,three pipelines and a governance framework. The CEO calls it "mature."

Revenue generated? Zero.

"Build me a dashboard" is a cost brief.
"Find me a buyer for this insight" is a commercial brief.

Same team, same data, totally different outcome.

🌳 alternata.io

27/04/2026

27/04/2026

Every company has a data strategy. Very few have a data revenue strategy.

Data strategy means dashboards, pipelines, warehouses, governance frameworks. Important, necessary but entirely internal.

Data revenue strategy means who pays for what we know, how much and under what terms.

One keeps the lights on. The other turns data into a revenue line.

The companies generating real alternative revenue from their data assets didn't start with better technology. They started with a different question.

Not "how do we organise our data?" but "who would pay for the insight it contains?"

That one question changes everything: how you structure teams, how you budget, how you measure success, and who sits at the table.

Most data leaders have never been asked it.

alternata.io

22/04/2026

The data you're buying isn't good enough.

Survey panels tell you what 2,000 people said they did. Transaction data tells you what 2 million people actually did.

Scraped pricing data gives you a snapshot, but a retailer's POS feed gives you the movie.

The gap between estimated intelligence and actual intelligence is where bad decisions live.

The real data exists, but it's often locked inside regulated companies who've never thought to sell it.

We unlock it, structure it and bring it to you.

🌳 alternata.io