Effective data management in banking is paramount in protecting your information, to avoid data leaks and maintain customer privacy. When handling confidential client information, there are various safety measures and precautions that banks take to ensure it remains secure.

First of all, data management involves a structured process of collecting the data, ensuring each client’s information is efficiently processed and organised. The storage of data is paramount in maintaining successful data management in accordance with the Data Protection Act (DPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and this often involves the cloud or on-site servers that are equipped to store and segment data appropriately.

The digitalisation of information has made it much easier to manage client records, especially when it comes to monitoring online behaviour and keeping records of money going in and out. Through IT infrastructure, analytical models can be made to provide insight into market trends and customer behaviour. They can detect patterns of behaviour to predict future events, also, such as the likelihood of a customer to become overdrawn.

This aspect of data management takes on a practical approach and enhances customer service, as well as giving the bank more information on how best to allocate funds. Alongside data analytics, online reports and dashboards can also track the bank’s performance.

 ‘The secure management of all types of data remains one of the highest priorities for the UK banking industry, especially with the added pressures of exponentially increasing fraudulent activity and targeted scams that have been born out of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Is your data safe?

Many people in the UK have concerns about their data being at risk due to hackers and fraudsters. Banks have a large task to avoid cyber attacks and fraud, create financial products and services tailored to customers, and pre-empt customers’ needs, all while storing and protecting vast amounts of data.

Data stores and legacy systems, although being hard to access, can be infiltrated, so banks ensure regular assessments and analysis of systems. Risk models can also be drawn up to create security plans in case something goes wrong, and banks can opt for more secure storage systems such as Apache Cassandra, which is a scalable, open-source database that enables lots of secure data to be stored at once.

“Data breaches create high-profile activity in the media and so the banks need to constantly invest and work even harder to protect their assets and reputations, which will ensure customer confidence is kept high.”

Customers are now able to request a copy of what personal information of theirs is stored by banks, although this can take up to 6 weeks. This is called a subject access request (SAR) and originates from the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), but it has remained in UK law under the Data Protection Act despite Brexit.

Banks work to provide trustworthy storage of customer funds alongside optimising their own revenue. By offering a positive customer experience and maximising the value gained from customer data, banks fulfil their role as an institution. Managing your data effectively is therefore in their best interest, not only to magnify their own revenue but also to maintain reliability as a business. But it is also important for us as customers to be diligent when it comes to storing our money and be aware of the risks that come with entrusting capital to a separate institution.