Understanding Data Compliance
Data compliance ensures that sensitive digital assets or data is organized and managed in a way to help companies meet business rules, workflows and policies along with legal and governmental regulations. It is also critical to the privacy of people’s personal information and how organizations store and secure that sensitive data. An organization’s data fuels business processes, workflows, applications and ultimately decision-making and insights.
Regulations around data compliance spell out what data needs to be protected, what processes are acceptable and what the penalties will be for failure to follow the rules. Data compliance ensures your business meets the minimum legal requirements.
This often can be confused with data security, which covers all the processes and technologies of securing sensitive data, including firewalls, authentication and password protection protocols. Therefore, businesses must be data compliant per regulations, but that doesn’t guarantee their data is secure – although the goal should be to have both data compliance and data security. To achieve security and privacy, enterprises need data governance, which includes organizational policies and processes that control how data is managed in the organization.
The Landscape
With GDPR, California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), HIPAA, PCI DSS, PII, anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) regulations – and many more globally, businesses must find a way to become and stay data compliant. The results can be crippling.
- Organizations lose an average of $4 million in revenue due to a single non-compliance event. (GlobalScape’s The True Cost of Compliance with Data Protection Regulations)
- The leading risk among organizations for 2022 so far is cyber incidents (e.g. cybercrime, IT failure/outage, data breaches, fines and penalties) followed by business interruption (42%), including supply chain disruptions. (Statista)
- 70% of risk and compliance experts said the pandemic has increased their reliance on technology to improve decision-making, performance monitoring and risk management. (Thomson Reuter’s Fintech, Regtech and the Role of Compliance Report 2021)
- In a data compliance survey, 62.4% of survey respondents said that their company isn’t “completely compliant” with the data regulations that apply to them, including GDPR, CCPA and CDPA. (Business 2 Community Survey)
How Data Compliance Fits in with IDP
In our current business world, documents are just a form of data that needs to be managed and governed. Most organizations have massive document repositories that sit as dark data, and can be a massive compliance headache.
Intelligent document processing (IDP) is a solution that uses AI-based technology to capture, classify, extract, validate and export data from documents into another system. Modern IDP platforms transform documents with unstructured or semi-structured data into actionable, structured data that can be fed into other systems to automate workflows, centralize information, perform data analysis and business intelligence, as well as simply make a large volume of data easily searchable.
Enabling accessible data is the crux of data compliance. A simple example is a person who no longer wants you to have their data, which could be in multiple applications and files. IDP offers an automated solution to make the data searchable so it can be deleted quickly and meet privacy requirements. Or, in one case study with Vopak, the world’s leading independent tank storage company, they used IDP and were able to reduce their audits from 2-3 weeks to only a few hours by eliminating manual data entry and searching. Alliance Bank used IDP to not only speed up the loan application process but they used it to increase fraud prevention and detection.
IDP Benefits for Data Compliance
There are hundreds of use cases for intelligent document processing, depending on industry and business needs, from accounts payable, human resources, mailroom and applications to loans, insurance claims, financial documents, records and transcripts. Here’s how IDP can help as it relates to data compliance:
- Can process large volumes of documents fast
- Streamlines regulatory reporting
- Connects with any RPA, analytics applications or any other system of record for more complete information
- Eliminates human errors from manual data entry
- Enables searchable data for easy removal of customer information if requested
- Decreases audit times from weeks to hours
- Can find documents in seconds
- Drives employee productivity, accuracy and efficiency
- Improves customer experience and satisfaction
- Can be used for KYC or AML initiatives to reduce fraud and suspicious activity
The consequence of non-compliance can risk financial losses and fines, security breaches, license revocations, business disruptions, poor patient care, trust, brand perception and reputation. It’s easier than you think to add IDP into your tech stack and avoid the consequences.
