Data in Action: Bringing Capital to Main Street
Open data is helping bring capital to Main Street businesses. For example, one fast-growing lender is combining data from a wide range of government sources to make working capital loans to small businesses. Using open data on industry-level economic trends, the company is able to build finer-tuned predictive models. Another data analytics startup is working with banks to unlock insights about businesses from new government sources. Critical data about businesses are buried in unexpected places. For example, it is possible to estimate the number of employees a given company has based on existing, publicly available data about participants its retirement plan.
Check out our extensive data, including the BLS Producer Price Index, Census data on manufacturing and trade inventories and sales, monthly and annual retail trade survey data, the NAICS business data classification system to start innovating to bring capital to America’s small businesses today!
