I rather thought it was a euphemism for Statistician. Which often gets a bad rap from the whole "lies, damn lies and statistics" type thinking.
Or quantitative analyst, but that sounds like you're participating in some kind of banking fraud.
I agree. There are different values in data to be discovered not just business.
That's interesting. I always thought business analysts worked on processes, not data. I've never met a business analyst who I'd consider an expert in statistical analysis. Focus was always process, and they (not to be demeaning) didn't seem to have the intelligence required of what people consider to be a data scientist (i.e. heavy math, scripting, etc).
Some do, some do R/SPSS/SAS/MATLAB etc etc. It's a broad role. If anything, so-called data scientists lack the big picture view and are just junior analysts in (unsurprising since they think they invented what they do).