Deloitte Data Vendor: Making the Case for a New Research Source
Identified a higher-quality data source, triangulated it across multiple references, and navigated budget and credibility pushback to bring it into the firm
Jaswanth Kumar B.
Associate Analyst at Deloitte
From their time as
Associate Analyst
Deloitte • 2024
Overview
Jaswanth was working on sector landscaping and company research at Deloitte, pulling data from government registries, D&B, PitchBook, Bloomberg, and EDGAR to build client segmentation and portfolio intelligence.
The Story
Jaswanth was working on sector landscaping and company research at Deloitte, pulling data from government registries, D&B, PitchBook, Bloomberg, and EDGAR to build client segmentation and portfolio intelligence.
In the course of that work, he identified a new market data source that he believed would improve the quality of the research outputs. The source was not in the firm's approved vendor list, and it was not free.
He did not just flag the source and move on. He built a case for it. He triangulated the data from the new source against multiple existing sources to demonstrate accuracy. He documented the paper trail, knowing that his team would question the credibility of anything unfamiliar.
When he presented his findings, the pushback came on two fronts. First, his colleagues questioned the quality and accuracy of the new source. Second, the budget team raised concerns about the cost of adding a new vendor. Jaswanth addressed both. He showed the cross-source validation that backed the data, and he worked with the team to evaluate whether the source was cost-effective relative to the improvement in output quality.
The team reached out to the vendor directly, and the source was approved and added to the firm's research toolkit. It is now part of how the team gathers market data.