Columbus Data Brokers

How the Business Data Trade Works

Ask most people what a data broker does and they will describe a firm that keeps files on individuals. That trade is real, but a business owner is more likely to run into its quieter cousin: companies that source facts about firms, markets and economic activity, refine them, and license the result to people making decisions.

It helps to picture a supply chain with four links. At one end are sources, the organizations whose software records something as a by-product of daily work. Next come aggregators, which collect from many sources, standardize the fields and stitch the pieces into one picture. Then platforms and resellers turn that picture into products: prospect lists, credit and risk scores for companies, market dashboards, location reports. At the far end sit the end users, such as lenders, insurers, analysts and retailers choosing new sites. They pay for answers, not spreadsheets.

Five Families of Business Data

Company profiles. Headcount, revenue range, industry codes, locations, years in business and the software a firm runs. This is the raw material of B2B sales and marketing tools, and much of it is assembled from public filings and websites.

Buying signals. Evidence that an organization is shopping for something, pieced together from which articles its staff read, which comparison pages they visit and what they search for.

Visit and movement counts. Estimates of how many vehicles or people pass or enter a location and at what hours. Landlords and chains use them to compare sites.

Market-level sales figures. Totals and averages pooled across many sellers so that no one customer shows through. Buyers use them to read demand by product line, neighborhood or month.

Operating exhaust. The logs a company produces just by working: scan events at a dock, readings from a compressor, ticket times at a service desk, shelf counts in a stockroom. This guide focuses on exhaust, because it is the category a local business most often owns outright.

Central Ohio's Data Economy

Columbus is Ohio's capital, the seat of Franklin County and the anchor of a growing Central Ohio metro. What stands out is how spread out its economy is. No single industry dominates, so very different kinds of data are produced within a few miles of each other.

Insurance, Banking and Back Offices

Nationwide has its headquarters downtown, and Huntington Bancshares is headquartered in Columbus as well. JPMorgan Chase runs a large operations campus at Polaris on the north side, and other banks and card issuers keep servicing and operations centers in the metro. Claims, underwriting and servicing records pass through Central Ohio in volume, almost all of it consumer financial information under strict rules. The more interesting opportunities sit around those institutions: independent agencies, adjusters, restoration contractors, collision shops and software vendors that record repair costs, cycle times and loss causes without needing a policyholder's name.

Retail, Restaurants and Consumer Brands

Few metros of this size have so many consumer brands on their doorstep. Bath & Body Works is based in the Columbus area, Abercrombie & Fitch has its headquarters campus in New Albany, and Wendy's is headquartered in Dublin. Columbus is also often described as a test market, a place where companies try new products, menus and store formats before a wider launch. Around those brands sits a layer of design studios, research firms, fulfillment centers and packaging suppliers, each with its own records of what consumers responded to.

Health, the University and Research

The Ohio State University is one of the largest universities in the country, and its Wexner Medical Center is a major hospital system. OhioHealth and Nationwide Children's Hospital add to the health footprint, and Cardinal Health, a large pharmaceutical and medical products distributor, is headquartered in Dublin. Battelle, the research and development organization, is also based in Columbus. Together they create a dense market for sponsored research, clinical work and the companies that supply them.

Government, Freight and New Infrastructure

As the capital, Columbus hosts state agencies and the contractors that serve them. Interstates 70 and 71 cross downtown, with I-270 looping around the city, and Rickenbacker International Airport on the south side handles air cargo and anchors an inland port with rail and warehouse space around it. The New Albany area and western Licking County have seen a wave of large data-center projects, and Honda's operations around Marysville in Union County support suppliers across the region.

The Suburbs and Surrounding Counties

Much of the region's commercial activity happens outside the city limits. Dublin, which reaches into Franklin, Delaware and Union counties, holds corporate campuses and medical offices. Westerville, Worthington, Upper Arlington and Hilliard mix professional firms with retail corridors. Grove City carries warehouse and trucking work, while Gahanna, Reynoldsburg and New Albany sit near the airport and the eastern business parks. Farther out, Delaware, Licking, Fairfield and Union counties add their own contractors, manufacturers and service firms. All of it falls under one state's law, though customers in other states can still pull in other rules.

Datasets Columbus Industries Tend to Hold

From the inside, a dataset rarely looks like one. It looks like a report somebody exports every Monday. Here is how that plays out across the industries that shape Central Ohio.

Retail and Consumer-Brand Records

There is a sharp difference between two things a store or restaurant keeps. Point-of-sale totals, such as units sold by item, basket size by daypart or the share of orders that used a promotion, can be summarized across stores and weeks until no shopper is visible. Loyalty program records are another matter: they attach purchases to a named member, an email address and often a phone number. Those are personal data, governed by whatever your program terms and privacy notice promised members at sign-up. The pooled figures are the realistic product; the member file almost never is.

Insurance and Financial Services Records

If you are a bank, credit union, lender, insurer or agency, assume that what you know about customers is nonpublic personal information. The firms that work alongside them have more room. A collision shop's repair times by part category, a restoration company's water-loss counts by month, or a payments software vendor's anonymized transaction volumes by merchant type can describe a market without describing anyone. Check vendor agreements first, because carriers and banks commonly claim the data their vendors handle on their behalf.

Logistics, Warehousing and Freight

Distribution centers on the south and east sides record inbound appointments, dock door turns, pick rates, cartons per order and trailer dwell. Carriers log lane volumes, empty miles, fuel stops and transit times along I-70 and I-71. Pooled across a season, these figures can show where freight demand is rising and where capacity is tight, which matters to brokers, industrial landlords and route-planning firms. Two cautions. Driver-level GPS traces are records about employees, so aggregate them first. And many shipper contracts state that shipment details belong to the shipper.

Consumer Research and Test-Market Work

Because brands try ideas here, local agencies and research firms often hold survey results, taste-test scores, focus group notes and early sales readings. Before treating any of it as yours to license, look at who commissioned the work. Research paid for by a client usually belongs to that client and is covered by confidentiality terms. Participant responses also come with whatever consent language people agreed to, and that language rarely mentions resale.

University Research Partnerships

Companies that fund or join projects with Ohio State or another university normally sign a sponsored research agreement. Those agreements spell out who owns the results, who can publish, what counts as confidential and what happens to data gathered during the project. Some give the sponsor a license rather than ownership. If human subjects were involved, an institutional review board approval and consent forms limit later use. Read the agreement before assuming a project dataset can be sold.

State-Government Contractor Data

Firms that build systems, run programs or collect information for a state agency usually work under contracts that restrict what the contractor may do with that information, often for the life of the contract and beyond. Treat contract data as the agency's unless the contract clearly says otherwise. Ohio's Public Records Act, ORC 149.43, makes a large share of government records available to anyone who asks, which is a useful reality check: if a buyer can request it from the agency for little or nothing, a copy from you is a commodity.

Licensable Data and Data to Leave Alone

Two tests sort most cases. Could the data be traced back to a person, a customer or a partner? And can you prove the right to pass it on?

Few of the right-hand cells turn on privacy statutes alone. In Central Ohio the bigger obstacle is usually paper: carrier vendor agreements, shipper contracts, research sponsorships, state contracts and app terms of service. Each can hand ownership of the data, or a duty to keep it confidential, to someone else.

Staff information needs its own pass. Timeclock entries, technician routes, call recordings and driver telematics are about your employees even when they live inside an operations system. Remove or pool them before anything is shared.

What Sets the Price of a Dataset

Nobody publishes a rate card for operational data. Prices are negotiated, and the same file can be worth a lot to one buyer and little to another. Still, the conversation almost always turns on the same questions.

1. Does it answer a decision?Data tied to something a buyer must decide, such as where to build, what to stock or how to price risk, commands more than data that is merely interesting.
2. How far back does it go?Three or four years of consistent records let a buyer separate trend from season. A few months rarely can.
3. How often does it refresh?A feed that updates weekly or daily supports ongoing monitoring, so buyers will usually pay more for it than for a single historical extract.
4. How much of the market does it see?Deep coverage of one niche in Central Ohio can be worth more than a thin slice of a national category.
5. Can it be bought elsewhere?If a public source, a scraper or an existing vendor already offers the same thing, price falls toward zero. Exclusivity is where value lives.
6. How clean is it?Stable field definitions, few gaps, no duplicates and a documented error rate save the buyer weeks of work, and they price that in.
7. Can it change hands safely?Data that is already pooled, stripped of identifiers and backed by clear proof of ownership reaches more buyers with less legal risk.

Delivery matters too. A small firm that can promise a steady, well-documented monthly file often looks better than a larger one offering a single export. Read any first number as a range that will move once samples are reviewed: an opening for diligence, not money in the bank.

Ohio and Federal Rules to Check First

Licensing data is not illegal in itself. The limits come from three places: federal statutes, Ohio statutes and the promises your business has already made. Work through all three before a file goes anywhere.

Your Own Commitments

Pull every privacy notice, loyalty term, app policy, customer contract and vendor agreement that touches the data. A promise not to sell or share customer information binds you, and quietly rewriting it later invites trouble. The platforms storing your records may also limit how exports are used.

Federal Law

HIPAA reaches health information in the hands of providers, health plans and their business associates. Sale of protected health information is tightly restricted, and de-identification must follow one of the methods HIPAA defines. With a large medical presence in Columbus, many vendors are business associates without realizing what that implies.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act governs how financial institutions, including banks, lenders, insurers and many payment and fintech firms, handle customers' nonpublic personal information, with notice, opt-out and safeguard duties. Insurance licensees also answer to the Ohio Department of Insurance on how they protect customer information.

Section 5 of the FTC Act outlaws unfair or deceptive conduct, and the FTC has used it when a company's data sharing outran its own disclosures.

Ohio Law

Ohio's breach notification statute, ORC 1349.19, requires businesses to notify Ohio residents when certain computerized personal information is accessed without authorization. Datasets that still carry names alongside account numbers or similar identifiers bring that obligation with them.

The Ohio Data Protection Act, ORC Chapter 1354, took effect in 2018. It is voluntary. A business that maintains a written cybersecurity program meeting a recognized framework can claim a defense in certain breach lawsuits. It does not create consumer rights, and it does not give anyone permission to sell data.

The Ohio Consumer Sales Practices Act, ORC Chapter 1345, prohibits unfair, deceptive and unconscionable acts in consumer transactions. Misrepresenting how customer information is used can fall within it.

At the time of writing, there was no comprehensive consumer privacy statute in Ohio. Two attempts at an Ohio Personal Privacy Act, House Bill 376 (2021) and House Bill 345 (2023), stalled without becoming law. Check current legislation at legislature.ohio.gov before relying on this paragraph.

Customers, members or research participants living in other states can bring those states' privacy laws into play, even for a business that never leaves Franklin County.

This page is general education and not legal advice. Talk to an Ohio-licensed attorney, and counsel in any other state involved, before licensing data.

Keeping Brokers Away From Your Business and Its Owners

While you weigh what your company might license, brokers are already compiling records about it and about the people who run it.

Ohio business filings, county property records, court dockets and professional licenses are public, and people-search sites stitch them together into profiles that can show an owner's home address, phone numbers and relatives. Where Ohio filing rules allow, list a statutory agent or office address instead of a home address.

Search the major people-search sites for yourself and for the company and use each site's official removal process. Keep dated notes of every request, because removed listings often come back. The main site's opt-out checklist lays out the steps.

Internally, limit who can export customer and staff records, require multifactor sign-in on the systems holding them, and ask vendors what they keep. Records that never leave your environment cannot land in a broker's catalog.