In March, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed the Utah Consumer Privacy Act (UCPA). Once it goes into effect early next year, it will provide consumers with greater protections and powers as it relates to their personal and sensitive data and how it is used and shared by companies.
While the UCPA is viewed as less onerous in the requirements it places on businesses, it is no doubt another next step in the creation of laws that will more strictly govern consumer data across the country. Utah consumers will have new powers over the collection of personal data and the right to opt-out of having their data shared and repurposed for marketing and advertising.
The implication for enterprises reliant on third-party data for marketing and targeting is significant. Companies desperate to understand and anticipate customer needs, preferences and habits to personalize experiences and market effectively could find pipelines to critical data and insights further siphoned off. It’s the primary reason why it has been predicted that brands will know and have insights into fewer than 20% of their customers in the years to come.
But it is also the reason why billing data is poised to become an even more valuable source of customer insights than it already is.
In addition to serving as a record for what needs to be invoiced, entitled and provisioned, billing data can yield in-depth insights into customer activity, revealing what a customer has purchased and when, the payment method used, service fees charges, changes to the subscription life cycle and much more. Billing data has the potential to plug some of the significant data gaps that enterprises will be forced to wrestle with as more data privacy laws emerge.
Best of all, billing data is first-party data, collected, owned and managed by the enterprise.
To date, billing data has primarily fallen under the purview of organizational finance teams. Enterprises seeking usable and contextual data related to customer experiences and relationships must begin to see billing data as a first-party data strategy and extend its availability beyond finance teams to the wider organization.
Modern billing platforms, like Aria’s, can feed data directly into data lakes and warehouses where it can be merged with available data from other sources to generate a more complete picture of the health of a customer relationship and generate deeper predictive insights about customer behavior.
The passage of the Utah legislation is the continuation of a trend that began in earnest with GDPR in the EU and the California Consumer Protection Act. Utah is the fourth state to enact data privacy laws, but similar bills are presently under consideration in 29 additional states, with the possibility of federal legislation looming as well.
These realities, combined with other factors such as the disappearance of 3rd-party cookies, will more deeply underscore the importance of billing data. In a world of enhanced data protection, enterprises capable of capturing and actionizing billing data and unlocking insights contained within will have a distinct competitive advantage.
