Jon Jacobson

Building intelligence that never has to see you

Jon Jacobson runs a company built on a contradiction that sounds impossible: let two organizations learn everything useful from each other's customer data, while making sure neither one ever sees the other's raw records. That is the whole product at Omnisient, the privacy-preserving data collaboration platform he co-founded and now leads as Group CEO and CTO.

The pitch is deceptively simple. A bank wants to lend to someone who has no credit history. A grocer already knows that same person buys the same staples every week, pays reliably, and never overextends. Neither can legally or safely hand the other a spreadsheet of names and purchases. Omnisient sits in the middle, using cryptography to tokenize and match the two datasets locally, so the bank gets a risk signal and the shopper's actual identity and basket stay private.

Jacobson frames the stakes in numbers he repeats often. "Nearly two billion people worldwide are excluded from affordable financial services, primarily due to insufficient behavioral data for risk assessment," he says. The problem, in his telling, is not that these people are bad borrowers. It is that the data proving they are good borrowers sits in the wrong place, locked away in loyalty programs, telecom logs and wellness apps that lenders have never been able to touch.

What Omnisient actually does

Omnisient's platform pulls together three things: privacy enhancing technologies, a secure collaboration environment, and embedded AI and analytics tools. The goal is to let banks, insurers, retailers and healthcare organizations draw insights from consumer data without moving or exposing it. Jacobson likes to point out how much faster this makes a slow, expensive process. Where a financial institution once needed 18 to 24 months to evaluate whether a new data source even had predictive value, Omnisient claims to compress that to about three months.

The results he cites are concrete. In one case study, a retailer's shopping data improved a bank's loan-repayment prediction by 40 percent for people with no formal credit history - enough, he says, to qualify 3.2 million previously excluded individuals for credit. "A local retail grocer's loyalty shopper data can be used by local banks to predict loan repayment by individuals without a credit history," Jacobson explains. It is a single sentence that reframes a receipt as a reference.

From Wall Street to a startup back home

Jacobson did not start out chasing financial inclusion. His first big leadership role was at Credit Suisse First Boston in New York, where he led the Global Financial Reporting team and delivered a suite of applications used by more than 300 financial controllers across the bank worldwide. It was serious infrastructure work at a serious institution, the kind of posting people build entire careers around.

He left it. In 1999 he returned to South Africa to build a first-of-its-kind multi-channel marketing platform, which grew to run omnichannel campaigns for global FMCG brands including Diageo and Levi's. In 2012 he joined Argility as Head of Omni-Channel Commerce, owning the retail technology strategy and the design of a Single Customer View platform. That thread - stitching together a coherent picture of a consumer from scattered data - runs straight through to Omnisient, which he co-founded in 2019.

The mix suits him. He is a software engineer who holds the CEO and CTO titles at the same company, and his university training combined computer science, economics and mathematics at Rhodes University. It is close to a blueprint for a person who would end up building cryptographic plumbing for consumer finance.

Data for good, and the ethics question

Jacobson describes Omnisient's ambition as "building the world's biggest source of consumer intelligence for good." That phrasing matters to him, because a platform that pools consumer data is one bad design decision away from being a surveillance product. His answer is architectural: the data is anonymized and tokenized locally using advanced cryptography before any collaboration happens, so value can be extracted without the raw personal records ever changing hands. Privacy and usefulness, in his framing, are not a trade-off to be balanced but a design problem to be solved.

He also sees where this goes next. Jacobson expects everyday consumer businesses to become credit and insurance score providers in their own right, with first-party data supplementing traditional credit bureaus and opening revenue lines beyond advertising. It is a future in which a grocer or a telco is not just selling goods but quietly vouching for its customers' reliability - carefully, and with consent.

Recognition, backers and reach

The idea has attracted institutional confidence. Omnisient counts more than 80 of Africa's largest banks, insurers, retailers and healthcare organizations as users, and its cap table includes TransUnion, which took a minority stake and struck a strategic partnership, and Africa's largest retailer. The company has been named to the World Economic Forum's Technology Pioneer Community, took part in TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield 200, sat on a United Nations Privacy Enhancing Technologies committee, and made Fast Company's "Next Big Things in Tech" list. Founded in South Africa, it now reaches into the UK, the Middle East, Brazil, Asia Pacific and the United States, with total funding of roughly $22 million.

Off the clock

When he is not working or with family, Jacobson trades screens for saltwater and sparring. He boxes, surfs and dives - pursuits that share a certain temperament with the day job: high commitment, low tolerance for half-measures, and a respect for systems that punish carelessness. It is not hard to see the same instinct in a founder who decided the only acceptable way to unlock consumer data was to build the privacy in first.