The financial services industry deals with some of the most sensitive and most often exploited customer data out there. Whether your financial services organization processes payments or manages tax information, it’s absolutely crucial to adhere to the highest standards of data privacy to protect your business and its customers.
Because of recent high-profile security breaches worldwide, data privacy has become a more critical issue than ever. By ensuring compliance to evolving data privacy regulations and by following the best practices outlined in this blog, your financial services data will remain secure, compliant, and protected.
Financial services data privacy legislation
Following the GDPR in Europe, several states in the U.S. have enacted data privacy regulations and laws of their own, including the CCPA in California. Many of these regulations apply to the financial services industry as well as other businesses. Additional regulations, such as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which requires proper disclosure of information-sharing practices, apply directly to financial services organizations.
Financial services organizations must maintain awareness about ever-changing data privacy regulations to avoid the adverse effects of non-compliance. For details on other data privacy laws that may affect your organization and the state of data privacy in your industry, download FormAssembly’s State of Data Privacy in 2019 whitepaper.
Why data privacy is important for financial services
Many financial services organizations possess huge amounts of sensitive customer information, which makes them especially susceptible to data breach risks. By failing to achieve higher standards of data privacy, financial services organizations run the risk of:
- Loss of customer trust and credibility
- Loss of revenue
- Massive non-compliance fines
- Compromised privacy for customers and employees
- Hacking and stolen financial services data
Best practices for financial services data privacy
Financial services organizations must collect data in order to conduct business, but ever-changing data privacy regulations can make the whole process seem overwhelming. By following these best practices and working with data collection vendors that do the same, you’ll be able to rest assured with safe, compliant financial services data:
- Keep data in the right hands with administrative controls
- Build a response plan to be prepared for a data breach even before it occurs
- Choose compliant, secure data management tools
- Encrypt all data in transit and at rest for an extra line of defense
- Familiarize yourself with the GDPR and other regulations relevant to your business
- Train all employees on data security best practices
Use FormAssembly to keep financial data secure
FormAssembly has helped hundreds of organizations securely and effectively process financial services data such as tax information, mortgage applications, payments, and more. Our data collection platform is PCI DSS Level 1 certified and compliant with CCPA, GDPR, GLBA (Compliance Cloud only), and other data privacy laws. Give FormAssembly a try today to experience simplified, yet secure data collection at your financial services company.
