Customers want enhanced, personalized experiences from nearly every company they deal with — especially their primary financial institution. To offer that, your organization will need data — lots of data. And along with that comes the tacit expectation that your organization keeps customer data ultra-secure.
Personalization is the new standard for attracting and keeping customers. According to a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults by Epsilon and GBH Insights, the overwhelming majority of respondents (80%) want personalization from retailers. The appeal of personalization is high among consumers ages 18 to 64, with 80% indicating they are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences and 90% indicating that they find personalization appealing. The converse is also worth mentioning: Getting the personalization wrong, or not doing it at all, may push a customer to depart for your competitor.
Digital onboarding is becoming the preferred method of account opening for a world living in a pandemic. Creating this enhanced customer experience requires collecting and leveraging data to develop a one-on-one personalized feel. But equally important is keeping their data rock-solid safe.
According to Steve Morgan at Cybercrime Magazine, the world will have created and stored 200 zettabytes of data by 2025 (a zettabyte is roughly 1 trillion gigabytes), which is the equivalent of every person on the planet carrying around 400 iPhones. Half of that will be stored in cloud environments. “With this exponential data growth the opportunities — for innovation, and for cybercrime — are incalculable because data is the building block of the digitized economy.”
Secure data governance is more crucial than ever. Data governance is the collection of processes that effectively manage your data, data assets, and metadata within your platform. Each data-governance policy will be customized to the organization, though many will have similar components.
You should always have processes in place to ensure that your data is accessible only by authorized users, secure from data leaks and bad actors — but at the same time available when users need access.
According to Forbes, “encryption is an essential component of security, as well as for meeting compliance mandates. Legacy encryption solutions only handle data in two states — encrypted and therefore unavailable or in use and thus decrypted. This creates an opening for data to be compromised anytime it needs to be read or modified.”
Some organizations use homomorphic encryption, a method that can allow calculations on data in its encrypted state, versus having to decrypt the data beforehand. Next-level encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, and secure multiparty computing will drive a new frontier in customer data protection.
Additionally, using a trusted strategic partner to handle the connection request helps keep data protected throughout its lifecycle. This can prevent direct access to the data and can incorporate other security measures to complement your data-security processes.
Customers want a personalized and convenient onboarding process, at the same time that your company must vet, validate and continuously monitor customer identities and mitigate unnecessary customer friction. In their report Digital Transformation Through Data, Deloitte identified the following segments of customer data:
Effectively, you need to know where each data type lives in order to properly secure it because often each type of customer data has a different business value and risk factor. Here are some additional security considerations:
Customers are increasingly impatient with seemingly shorter and shorter windows of accessibility. Your onboarding process needs to move at their speed or risk losing them to a competitor. When evaluating potential solutions, consider digital identity-verification systems like Instnt Accept™ that can verify your customers using geo location, biometrics and neural networks.
At Instnt, security and customer growth is our top priority. Try Instnt Accept™today by requesting a free demo.