Today, financial services marketers are facing great challenges with recent laws and increased customer sensitivity around data privacy while communicating with their customers across channels. Any communication that can identify an individual can be shared only if there is explicit consent from the person and effective security controls. It is very tough to control these tasks manually. Evolving data privacy laws also multiplies the compliance burden on organizations and failure to comply with these regulations could result in hefty penalties. Compliance is no longer a one-time affair and is likely the first of many, yet organizations continue to approach them in isolation which can have multiple repercussions and overlooked opportunity cost of compliance like wasting a lot of your employees’ time in meetings alone.

There are different regulations for across geographies like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for UK and EU, California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) for US, The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) for Canada, Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) for South Africa, etc. And for each of these regulations, there are key data privacy focus areas around:

• Consent – In this area, companies need to categorize sensitive & personal information of the customers, define purposes of how they are planning to process this data to target them with personalized offers and before targeting them, companies need to broadcast their purposes with the customers and & seek their consent to use their personal information for a specific purpose. Once the companies receive the consent, they need to enforce the consent in a system and provide opt-in/opt-out modification facility to the customer.
• Consumer Rights: Apart from taking consents, consumer right is another key focus area which talks about the different rights of the consumer which a company must keep in mind to be compliant with the data privacy laws. Consumers have every right to access, correct, port, delete their personal information at any point of time and companies need to adhere with these rights. Consumers can even ask the companies to not sell their personal information to any third party or to use their personal and sensitive data in very limited communications.

What can Organization do to tame this mammoth challenge?

Thus, to achieve compliance, automation for these data privacy focus areas across global regulations, organization’s operational needs typically shape its preference center approach.  On a smaller scale, channel, or platform specific like email or CRM options are the best fit. But if we are looking at the enterprise level, a centralized, governed, scalable and automated preference compliance center can drive consistency and eliminate rework at scale. 

• Organizations can leverage centralized consent management solution which can collect and store customers' consent data to keep track of privacy preferences and permissions of the customer. It can enable organizations to collect every individual’s privacy preference, regulate the masking and unmasking of personal data based on their stated preferences and keep track of subsequent changes to those preferences all in one accessible place.
• It can automate the recording and tracking of the collection and use of an individual’s data and hence its summarized view is available 24x7 if required for audits. It can also help organizations to add or change rules to coordinate data privacy settings as new regulations emerge as it operates separately from business applications.

Preference and Consent Management can provide you an opportunity to know the customer by understanding value-based behaviors and decision drivers, engage the customer through consistent, purposeful, and transparent interactions and deliver the better customer experience leveraging integrated analytic platforms assisted by artificial intelligence. And above all these it can help you in continuously building customer trust while meeting new mandated compliances with an extensible, “future ready” approach.

By managing the consents and preferences of your customers effectively, organizations can preserve and extend brand promise by reducing their customer service calls through centralized self-service compliance data extraction and tagging with streamlined historical change inquiries and confirmations and improving the end customer experience by integrating real time customer preference across customer experience/journey and enhancing opt-in/opt-out preference analytics to drive product and communication excellence.