Rado Lipus, founder and CEO of Neudata, which scouts new and interesting datasets, and connects data providers with hedge fund and asset management clients, says there is strong demand for big data from family businesses and family offices.

"The data monetization opportunity for many family office/family businesses to the financial sector is in several millions of dollars of recurring revenues,” he says. “And in rare cases in tens of millions of recurring revenues. It is particularly valuable if the data source is unique, has granularity, and its timeliness is high.”

Lipus adds that businesses don’t need to be big to have valuable data. “I think the key is that the data, from large or small businesses, provides something new or different. The data has to be of good quality - the key is how clean is it, consistency, history, length, data frequency (hourly, daily, weekly etc), and how compliant it is.”