DATA: DATA HANDLING
Compliance will be rewarded. Are you ready to comply...? We quizzed Anuradha Muralidharan from payments superapp Expensify, data custodian Very Good Security’s Atvmanda Heinemann, and Andrew Veitch of expense management platform Eedenbull on the burden and competitive opportunity of compliant payments data handling
THE PAYTECH MAGAZINE: Is the amount of regulation surrounding use of sensitive data a barrier to fintechs launching and achieving their full potential? ANURADHA MURALIDHARAN (COO, EXPENSIFY): Definitely. It’s a mental and monetary deterrent to businesses. Expensify started as a corporate card. Our founder and CEO David Barrett is a brilliant network engineer, and he’d been able to homegrow an infrastructure for the corporate card with all the encryption and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCIDSS) and system and organisational controls compliance built in from day one. That’s not easy for everybody to do because you need the right expertise, which is expensive, and you have to go through the cumbersome compliance certification process. Even so, maintaining a corporate card as a startup was so difficult, we ended up pivoting. In fact, we’d originally built the expenses app just to demo the card’s www.fintechf.com
functionality – but it had generated a huge amount of interest. ANDREW VEITCH (COO, EEDENBULL): Having to hire full-time engineers and compliance managers to handle the certifications, before we could even launch, was indeed a challenge. There are so many other things you want to be doing to develop your product, interface and experience. Taking people away from doing those things is an overhead to begin with. So, you have to work with partners that can help you get through it, as easily and as quickly as possible. So, regulation is a block but, that said, having the policies and procedures in place helps businesses – banks and other financial institutions can then work with them because it gives them confidence you know what you’re doing. AMANDA HEINEMANN (BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT & PARTNERSHIPS LEAD, VERY GOOD SECURITY): Very Good Security is all about reducing the
data security and compliance liability for our customers, and taking that on ourselves. We sit on sensitive data for our customers, enabling them to get the full utility from it – without having to house it – to expedite compliance. About 70 per cent of our customer base is in fintech – it’s our sweet spot. The remainder are healthtechs, healthcare and e-comm providers. Maintaining good data security has become a core KPI for fintechs. How they treat sensitive data is very important and, in the worst-case scenario, a data breach can lose them customers. As Andrew says, data security and compliance are also prerequisites for partnering with other ecosystem players. TPM: How can businesses iterate once they have the core compliance features in place, to get new features out to market quickly? AV: Hopefully, they’re savvy enough to understand what additions need to be made, if any, on top of what they already have. Issue 9 | ThePaytechMagazine
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