The next Equifax will be even worse — but is preventable, fintech VC says

The only way to prevent the next Equifax might be to appoint a “Data Czar” with far-reaching powers and prowess, a prominent fintech VC says.

“We’ll have to use pretty much every trick that we know in the book and have adult supervision to go along with it,” says Sahil Kini, principal at the Bangalore-based venture capital firm Aspada Investments and a self-described technology evangelist.

Data is a “natural resource” and to protect it, he says, regulators must have the tools — and the authority — to enforce “how a company or even the state manages and stores and shares data.”

Kini is working with the Indian government to create the world’s largest biometric ID system via smart cards (think of it as India’s version of digital Social Security cards where fingerprint IDs are used to create a digital identification program).

In an interview with LinkedIn as the Equifax scandal took another turn, Kini offered his best advice for dealing with problems at such scale. Only today CEO Richard Smithjoined two other senior executives who decided to “retire” after the big three US credit monitoring agency fell victim to a hack which exposed 143 million financial profiles in an attack that unfolded over several months – and took the company several more to publicly disclose.

This is only the beginning, Kini warns.

Read more from Walden Siew on Linkedin Pulse.