Who Owns the Customer Journey Data?

In 2025, data is not just a support function. For many businesses and especially for investors, customer-journey data is fast becoming a critical asset. Who formally owns this data, how it is governed, and how it is leveraged can meaningfully alter value creation, exit potential, and risk profile.

As private capital markets get more competitive and data-driven, data ownership and governance are no longer back-office concerns, they are deal-defining and value-defining decisions.

Why Customer Journey Data Matters

Customer journey data, for example the sequence of touchpoints a customer has with a brand: browsing websites/apps, purchase behavior, service interactions, churn behavior, feedback, contains valuable behavioural and preference signals. These data enable firms to:

• Understand real customer behavior, segment customers, track purchase frequency, churn likelihood, product usage patterns.

   

• Estimate long-term value: using metrics like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Customer Equity (the aggregate of CLV across customers), companies can forecast revenue potential beyond current financials.

   

• Personalize offerings, improve retention, cross-sell, and optimize acquisition cost, all powerful levers for margin expansion and recurring revenue.

   

Many companies including target firms in deals treat customer data as a byproduct, often fragmented across legacy systems, third-party providers, or siloed business units. That leaves enormous value unrealized.

Data Ownership & Governance

Owning customer data carries more than just analytical upside. It is a foundation for trust, control, compliance, and long-term value creation.

• Strategic Control & Security

Owning data empowers a company to control access, ensure data quality, guard against breaches, and set clear rules for usage or monetization. Without proper ownership, data can become a liability, poor quality, inconsistent, or legally contested.

Research in industrial settings underlines this: where data value is expected (e.g., from IoT, customer usage logs), unclear ownership often leads to under-investment in data security and poor data governance.

• Value Monetization and Business Options

When customer data is owned and well-governed, it becomes a strategic asset: enabling new business models (subscriptions, cross-sell, direct-to-consumer channels), better pricing, retention strategies, and even third-party data services, potentially turning data into an independent revenue stream.

• Due Diligence & Exit Readiness

For investors, data governance is becoming a key factor in due diligence and exit readiness. Firms with clean, auditable, well-structured customer data rarely face surprises at exit. On the other hand, target companies lacking data control often carry valuation discounts or face integration risk post-acquisition. 

An analysis by KPMG highlights that data-and-analytics infrastructures contribute significantly to sustainable EBITDA improvement, operational resilience, and portfolio value, especially in a volatile, high-cost capital environment.

What Good Data Governance Looks Like

For a firm (or a portfolio company) to turn customer-journey data into value, data ownership alone is not enough. Governance, quality, and integration matter.

Here are some common principles, drawn from industry literature and best practices:

Why Data Ownership Should Be a Key Due Diligence Question

When assessing a target company, asking about customer-journey data, its volume, structure, ownership, governance, and quality, should be as standard as reviewing financials or asset conditions. Here’s why:

• Better Revenue Forecasting & Value Creation Potential — A target with clean customer data and analytics capability offers clearer growth levers, cross-sell, customer retention, pricing, personalization, lower churn. That translates into higher exit multiples.

   

• Reduced Integration Risk — Firms that already own and govern their data integrate more smoothly post-acquisition, less time wasted aligning systems, cleaning data, reconciling records.

   

• Exit Readiness & Buyer Appeal — Trade buyers or strategic acquirers increasingly value data maturity. As one consulting firm puts it, companies with “data and analytics as part of the value-creation story” command premiums.

   

• Flexibility and Optionality — With good data, firms can pursue multiple monetization paths: direct sales growth, subscription models, data-as-a-service, or strategic partnerships.

   

In short, data ownership and governance is a core value lever and exit enabler.

The Risks of Ignoring Data Ownership

Ignoring data governance and ownership can backfire. Some of the common pitfalls:

• Fragmented or poor-quality data — leading to inaccurate customer profiles, bad segmentation, marketing waste, and misguided strategic decisions. Industry advisers note many PE-backed companies underperform because they overestimate what their data can deliver.
• Regulatory or privacy risks — mishandling customer data can lead to reputational damage, compliance fines, or even loss of consumer trust. As customer expectations evolve, transparency and consent-based data stewardship are becoming critical. 
• Missed monetization opportunities — treating data as a byproduct, or outsourcing data ownership to third parties, limits the ability to build deeper business models, run targeted marketing, or use data insight for strategic pivots. 
• Exit friction or valuation discount — during exit or sale, buyer due diligence may flag data gaps, inconsistency, or missing customer-level insight, reducing buyer confidence and potential pricing.

The Path Forward for Firms and Investors

1. Map and audit existing customer-journey data: where is data collected (web, CRM, support, mobile, etc), who owns it, how clean is it, how complete and integrated.

    

2. Designate data ownership & governance roles: assign a “data owner” and “custodian” for customer data, with accountability for quality, security, compliance.

    

3. Integrate data systems across the customer lifecycle — unify CRM, transaction systems, marketing platforms, support logs, behavioral data — to build a full customer-journey view.

    

4. Invest in analytics and data monetization capability — build or acquire talent and tools to derive insights (CLV modeling, segmentation, predictive churn, pricing optimization), and embed data-driven decision-making into operations.

    

5. Implement data governance and privacy frameworks — ensure compliance with local and international regulation, establish privacy-first policies, consent mechanisms, transparency with customers.

    

6. Embed data narrative into value creation story — when pitching deals or raising capital, highlight customer data assets as strategic advantages, retention, monetization, cross-sell potential, defensibility.

Data Ownership as the Next Strategic Frontier

In the coming decade, “data ownership”, especially of customer-journey data will become a key differentiator. Firms that treat data as a strategic asset, not a byproduct; that govern it carefully; and that harness it for value creation will stand out.

For investors, due diligence should expand beyond financials, assets, and operations, to include data architecture, governance, quality, and monetization potential. That’s where real upside (or risk) lies.

Customer data is more than information. It is value, optionality, and defensibility. And in an increasingly digital, competitive world, the fight over who owns that data might well be the next battleground in private markets.