Shanghai Data Exchange Goes Live
The Shanghai Data Exchange opened for business last Thursday, as part of China’s latest initiative to propel the city into the forefront of innovation and to develop a market for data that can be sorted, priced, and traded like commodities.
First data trading system in China
The Shanghai Data Exchange will give the country its first data trading system, covering data trading subjects and providing services including data compliance consulting, quality assessment, and asset valuation
As reported by the South China Morning Post, an initial offering of 20 data products were offered at the start of trading last week, from an initial batch of 100 enterprises that have signed up as data merchants, and include accounting firm PWC, China Eastern Airlines, and cloud services firm UCloud.
One of the first transactions conducted through the Shanghai Data Exchange saw the Shanghai branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China strike a deal to use data from the State Grid’s Shanghai Municipal Electric Power Co to help improve its financial products.
While China has set up data exchanges in the past, earlier efforts such as the one in Guiyang had failed to take off since its launch in 2015. On its part, the Shanghai Data Exchange uses a trading system that is the first of its kind in China. For instance, the transaction will not be conducted if the data purchaser cannot explain the exact scenario in which the data will be used.
“Setting up the Shanghai Data Exchange is an important move in accelerating the circulation of data and unleashing digital dividends, as the exchange has gathered the scattered data to make it more valuable,” said Pan Helin, executive director with the digital economy research institute under the Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, to the Global Times.
“Setting up a new data exchange in Shanghai shows the country's contribution to improving the efficiency of resource allocation of enterprises and promoting data circulation around the world, as China's data management continuously improves,” said Liu Gang, director of the Nankai Institute of Economics and an economist.
The need for data exchanges is growing as organizations and governments increasingly turn to data. Snowflake last year unveiled a data cloud to provide more opportunities around data and help breakthrough data silos.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) also launched the Singapore Financial Data Exchange last December to enable Singaporeans to consolidate their financial information.
Image credit: iStockphoto/WangAnQi
