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In a groundbreaking announcement at Money20/20 USA, DrumWave introduced its revolutionary dWallet® (data wallet) and the world’s first Data Savings Account, marking a significant milestone in the evolution of personal data ownership and monetization. The development was highlighted in a recent episode of BIGCast titled “Identifying the Standouts at Money20/20,” where host Glen Savardy dubbed DrumWave’s innovation as “wild” and “outside-the-box.”
The Missing Interchange in the Cloud
DrumWave’s founder and CEO, André Vellozo, highlighted a critical gap in today’s digital economy: the absence of interchange in cloud services. While banks and carriers operate with established interchange sheets, cloud services function like “unregulated banking,” with major providers extending credit similar to traditional banks. The key difference lies in how value is captured and distributed.
“Everything we do generates value and data, and it is being just lost to the ether,” Vellozo explained. “Every time you make a purchase, use a phone, use an app, buy a product, you’re generating data that is a positive externality that you are not capturing as a consumer.”
The True Value of Personal Data
Brittany Kaiser, DrumWave’s newly appointed Chief Evangelist and co-founder of the Own Your Data Foundation, provided striking context about the value of personal data. Referencing Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony, she revealed that Facebook values each user’s data at approximately $48 per quarter, amounting to over $500 billion annually – and that’s just Facebook.
“Think about Google, which has at least 30 times the amount of data that Facebook does on us, and the millions of other companies and products that are producing data or collecting the data we are producing daily,” Kaiser noted.
Innovation in Data Ownership and Monetization
DrumWave’s new offering combines APIs with a novel data savings plan concept. Vellozo drew an analogy to how carriers traditionally distributed phones with data plans: “Now imagine that banks or other companies that have direct-to-consumer relationships can distribute dWallets, credentials, with a data savings plan that goes on top of your carrier data plan.”
The $10 Trillion Data Processing Asymmetry
The scale of the opportunity becomes clear when comparing traditional financial institutions with tech giants. Vellozo pointed out that while the top five banks and two largest credit card processors – which handle almost all global money transactions – have a combined market cap of $3 trillion, Big Tech’s valuation stands at $13 trillion, representing a $10 trillion asymmetry between processing money and data.
A Revolutionary Step Forward
For Kaiser, who has been advocating for data ownership for over a decade, DrumWave’s solution represents a transformative approach. “As a former whistleblower, thinking about actually giving people an easy-to-use product where both businesses and individuals can own their data… and use your data not just as your property, but really harness that value and use your data as money, that is completely revolutionary.”
This innovative platform promises to reshape how individuals and businesses think about, manage, and monetize their data, potentially disrupting the current paradigm of data ownership and value creation in the digital economy.
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Chris Knight serves as U.S. PR director for DrumWave