Data is boring. What's interesting is the stories you build on that data

Adir Shiffman on making financial data sexy.

Adir Shiffman is an Australian serial tech startup founder, investor, and Executive Chairman of global athlete analytics leader Catapult Sports. And he’s been rated the World's 10th Most Innovative Person in Sports Business.

After qualifying in medicine and practising as an MD, Adir made the switch to startup founder and over the last decade launched, built and sold more than a dozen high-growth tech companies. In the process, he became one of the foremost technology experts in Australia. 

A regular speaker and guest at events around the world, Adir has been featured in Fortune, Forbes, This Week in Startups, Sports Illustrated, Smart Company, WSJ, ESPN, and the Australian Financial Review. He’s also appeared internationally on TV and radio, and his views on technology and innovation have been widely published.

Phew.

Adir’s story is as fascinating and impressive as those told through Catapult’s performance technology which is worn by athletes and sports teams to help them reach their peak and is also letting fans get closer to their sporting heroes and the action on the pitch. 

“We were probably best known originally for inventing a unique kind of wearable technology that players wear in a garment on their back while they're playing and training. It captures a thousand data points a second, and it gives this fantastic data that eventually becomes predictive of their risk of injury or trains them to maximise performance at the right time in the season or the right time in their careers. Now we’ve combined it with a whole lot of video data that we ingest into our software platform that enables some pretty interesting things.”

Adir’s the first to admit that data is itself boring - it’s what you do with it that makes it exciting. 

“Data itself is boring. If you look at the data coming out of financial services, it's largely numbers, and that's ultra-dry. What's interesting is the narratives and the stories that you build based on that data. With Catapult, what you'll see from a fan point of view is increasing sophistication in telling stories that originate with unique data. That's what's exciting in the future for fans.” 

And, as Adir told the Upfront podcast, financial services need to take on the same mentality and start telling more stories with their data.

“When you look at information and data around financial behaviour, no stories are being told. I would bring creative people into the organisation and say, what do you wish you could tell the consumer to make their lives better?”

When you look at information and data around financial behaviour, no stories are being told.

Having worked closely with financial services institutions, Adir admits those with legacy technology are in a difficult position. 

“We've moved into a world now where every single company, whether they deal with consumers or with businesses is expected to have a nice, shiny user interface and user experience at the front. There is no mercy anymore. In a way, it’s unfair because fintechs come to the party, they generally have one product or two products and no silos or any kind of long-term legacy to deal with. They don't have billions of dollars of tech debt they're wading through. And so they put a nice front end on something that's effectively a one or two product show, and start making everybody look bad.” 

Despite this, Adir says he’s not a believer in the imminent and complete disruption of legacy financial institutions because even the big techs aren’t doing much to impress him. 

“God knows the information that Flybuys (an Australian loyalty programme) has about me. But while God might know, I don't know because it's not used to target anything towards me. I have an iPhone and I use Apple pay extensively. They know a lot of stuff about me from my payment history, and I haven't seen them doing anything smart or impressive with the data. Effectively, it just sits there, and the closest I get to anything is the transaction summary. So I think it's easy to criticise banks and other financial institutions, but this is big tech at the cutting edge of global innovation, and they’re not blowing me away as a customer. It might be a strategic decision to like gently walk on and crush the toes of the banks one step at a time, but I haven't been particularly impressed with anything that they've done.”

I use Apple pay extensively. They know a lot of stuff about me from my payment history, and I haven't seen them doing anything smart or impressive with the data.

What data will lead to some kind of information or advice that will make customers richer? I think that many stones still remain unturned in that space.

Part of the problem he says is down to companies being wary about using data correctly and ethically.

“You think you've got problems in financial services, Catapult collects biometric data about player performance. Fundamental to those players and teams being comfortable with us collecting that information and being a repository of that information is confidence about how we're going to store that and confidence about how we're going to use it and how we're going to share it and more particularly not share it. It's taken us a long time to deliver confidence to the mainstream teams, players and athletes. It was not a simple process. You have various requirements in financial services and biometric data, which is a high bar that you need to get over. The issue here is not having data. It's knowing what is the right data to use in the right quantities to improve that customer experience. So the question is what data will lead to some kind of information or advice that will make customers richer? I think that many stones still remain unturned in that space.

Listen to Adir's episode Vital statistics here or wherever you get your podcasts.

What I love about financial services

There's been this gradual improvement over the course of two decades in the way that we engage with financial services. If it had happened all in one hit, nobody could have dealt with it. It would have been completely mind-blowing that I can go and do banking online and money is transferred instantly, I can pay via NFC without having to have a wallet, and I can buy and sell shares, and it all happens in real-time and for virtually no cost. Because it's all happened so gradually, it's just become part of life, and I realise how much I've taken the last 20 years for granted.

Adir Shiffman - Executive Chairman, Catapult Sports