INVESTING in the Jamaican stock market is often frustrating due to poor access to timely, organised data. While global platforms like Bloomberg simplify investment research, Jamaica still struggles with digitisation and data accessibility.

Raquel Seville, a data scientist and former corporate analyst, saw the gap first-hand. After over a decade in data roles, she launched Dataffluent, a fintech start-up designed to deliver clean, digestible financial insights for the local market.

“I realised that in the financial space, especially in Jamaica and the Caribbean, there is a major issue with just getting timely access to financial data that is in a form that is easy to digest, easy to understand, and easy to find trends and patterns in so one can make investment decisions on time,” said Seville, founder of Dataffluent.

In 2024 the idea secured US$120,000 in funding from Techstars to build out the platform, and Dataffluent completed an accelerator programme to continue to scale the platform.

According to Seville, there was no clear example of an investing data platform locally to follow. While
Bloomberg exists, she explained that it uses an old terminal-style design that can be complicated. Dataffluent set out to create something more modern, clean, and easy to use, while still giving investors the insights they need.

Without a local model to guide them, the team relied on the expertise of their advisors to shape the development process. Dataffluent assembled an advisory board that included Kesha Bailey, CEO of Profit Jumpstarter, and Stacey Hines, CEO of Epic Transformation. Bailey led the financial strategy, while both advisors helped shape the overall design framework.

he team first completed a comprehensive end-to-end design phase that involved mapping out the platform’s user interface, user experience, and analytics requirements before any development began.

“We wanted to ensure that we could have had the financial expertise to be able to guide us to say, ‘If I were an analyst, this is what I’d want to see. This is how it should look. These are the key things. This is what I’m looking for.’ And that was instrumental in us designing the platform to meet the needs of the market,” Seville told the Jamaica Observer.

With a deep understanding of data architecture, Seville and her team then built the back end infrastructure to ensure the data was properly structured, ready for analysis, and aligned with the functional goals of the platform.

Dataffluent began by focusing on the Jamaica Stock Exchange, building a platform that allows users to access and analyse market data. The company’s primary focus is currently on serving business clients, particularly financial institutions, through a business-to-business (B2B) model, similar to Blo omberg, Morningstar, or FactSet, designed for financial analysts and institutions. However, unlike those global platforms, Dataffluent focuses on delivering detailed, market-specific insights for the Jamaica Stock Exchange and other smaller markets that are often overlooked. It is also developing a business-to-consumer (B2C) version for individual investors.

At the moment, Dataffluent is running a private pilot with select financial institutions. The platform is not yet publicly available; however, the team is using this phase to gather feedback, identify potential issues, and fine-tune the product before its wider release to the market.

“We’re literally having meetings, demos with financial institutions, and working through onboarding them,” Seville shared with the Sunday Finance.

The long-term vision for the platform is to make financial data more accessible in underserved markets. This includes Jamaica, the Caribbean, parts of Latin America, and Africa. The company wants to become the main source of data across different types of assets, such as stocks, bonds, real estate, and other relevant assets in these regions.

“We’re hoping that being able to provide that data, maybe through APIs, through whatever subscription-type models, will also spur innovation as well. We’ll help even young entrepreneurs to be able to create new platforms, new companies, around having this data set available,” she said.

Ultimately, Dataffluent wants to either be acquired or listed on the Jamaica Stock Exchange as part of its exit strategy.