Manish Gurnani, CTO of Ksolves India, emphasized the importance of big data for fintech firms during the Fintech Festival India 2021-22, discussing the efficiency and effectiveness of big data workloads. He highlighted the four critical components for the success of big data initiatives, as theorized by Carsten Lund Pedersen and Thomas Ritter, labeled as the 'four D.A.T.A. questions' which focus on data access, employee autonomy, technology capabilities, and accountability. Gurnani proposed a scoring system based on these questions to predict the success of big data projects, advocating for a data-driven approach to initiative success.