Rebecca Herold, founder of SIMBUS and CEO of The Privacy Professor, said these these core elements are necessary for fintech organizations to securely handle personal information, while concurrently meeting most regulatory compliance requirements:

Strong executive support, and clear information security and privacy authority. Fintech institutions will not be successful with their privacy and information security program efforts without clear and strong support from executive management.
Privacy and security policies and procedures. This helps ensure consistent policy implementation, adherence and enforcement.
Risk management. Fintech institutions need to establish, as part of their larger information security and privacy program, a risk management program that includes risk assessments.
Training and awareness. You can have the best policies and procedures in the world, but if workers have not read and received training on them, and do not know how to implement them in their own daily job responsibilities, they will not be useful.
Vendor management. Commitments to protect data do not end with data activities assigned to third parties; responsibilities follow that data.
Breach management. You should implement regulatory requirements for breach identification, management and notices, such as per the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act final guidance. There are also at least 54 state and territory level breach notice laws in place.

Herold explained, "To meet a wide variety of legal obligations and regulatory compliance requirements, fintech and financial organizations need to implement strong protections for personal information they collect, store, transmit, process and otherwise access, that is collected or derived from their customers, and consumers (those who provide information to the institution, but are not actual customers), as well as their employees. These legal obligations generally also apply to third parties that financial institutions engage with."

Instant Insights /

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