Research reveals the struggle between chief data officers and legal departments
When it comes to repurposing customer data for secondary uses, financial services companies may experience an incompatibility between the opinions of their legal departments and those of the chief data officers.
In a survey of more than 400 chief data officers (CDOs) from multinational companies who had attended FIMA Europe 2019, 53 per cent reported being informed by their legal departments, in the last six months, that they could not repurpose customer data in the ways they desired.
However, 90 per cent of these CDOs said that they are either presently repurposing such data, or are intending to do so within the next year. In addition, 83 per cent then said that employing technical controls to manage and comply with privacy rights may significantly boost their companies’ opportunities to utilize customer data for innovation purposes.
These findings are especially relevant given the current regulatory landscape, with the implementation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which governs data privacy, and the second Payment Service Directive (PSD2), which covers electronic payment services.
According to a news release by Anonos, the data privacy and enablement technology provider that undertook the research, financial services organizations are now, for the most part, unable to fall back on “processing grounds of anonymisation, consent and contract when they want to repurpose customer data for big data analytics, machine learning and AI.”
The findings of this survey elucidate the obstacles faced by financial services companies seeking to repurpose data to acquire a competitive advantage. Gary LaFever, chief executive officer and general counsel at Anonos, said that the research showed that “CDOs are facing a struggle with their legal department when it comes to generating revenues from the trove of data their organisation possesses.”
