In a world that has moved to the internet and the mobile, data privacy is paramount. This is more evident in financial services. As India embraces digital financial services, the volume of sensitive consumer data has soared. Protecting this data is essential not only for regulatory compliance but also for building and maintaining consumer trust. Robust data privacy practices prevent financial crimes such as identity theft and fraud, ensuring the integrity of financial systems, and the security of customers.

The Significance of Data Privacy in Indian Fintech

The digital transformation of financial services in India has led to an explosion in the amount of sensitive consumer data being collected, processed, and stored. Ensuring the privacy and security of this data is vital for maintaining consumer trust and preventing financial crimes such as identity theft and fraud.

Challenges in Prioritising Data Privacy While Fostering Innovation

Regulatory Compliance: The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2023, aims to provide a robust framework for data protection. Fintech companies must navigate these regulations, requiring significant expertise and resources to ensure compliance without stifling innovation.

Data Security: With rising cyber threats, fintech firms must prioritise data security. Implementing advanced security measures like encryption, multi-factor authentication, and regular security audits is crucial to protect consumer data from breaches.

Transparency and Consent: Consumers are increasingly concerned about data usage. Fintech companies must ensure transparency in their practices and obtain explicit consent from users for utilising their personal information for various analysis, which can be challenging in a rapidly evolving industry.

Balancing Personalisation and Privacy: Personalisation enhances user experiences but requires access to detailed consumer data. Fintech companies must balance data utilisation for personalisation with respecting consumer privacy, ensuring that customer data is protected at all times.

Strategies for Prioritising Data Privacy at CARD91

1. Embedding Privacy into Product Development: CARD91 integrates data privacy considerations from the initial design phase of all products and services, ensuring inherent protection of consumer data.
2. Advanced Security Technologies: CARD91 deploys cutting-edge security technologies, including AI for threat detection and end-to-end encryption, to safeguard consumer data from cyber threats and breaches.
3. Regular Privacy Audits and Assessments: Frequent privacy audits and assessments help CARD91 evaluate and enhance the effectiveness of its data protection measures, identifying and addressing potential vulnerabilities promptly.
4. Employee Training and Awareness Programs: Ongoing training and awareness programs for employees foster a culture of privacy awareness, ensuring all staff members understand their role in protecting consumer data.
5. Consumer Education and Transparency: CARD91 prioritises transparency by clearly communicating its data privacy practices to consumers and providing educational resources to help them understand their rights and protection measures.
6. Robust Incident Response Plan: A comprehensive incident response plan enables swift and effective action in the event of a data breach, minimising its impact on consumers.

By focusing on these key strategies, CARD91 ensures that data privacy remains a top priority while fostering innovation in the Indian fintech market. This approach not only complies with regulatory requirements but also builds lasting trust with customers, driving long-term success.

The Role of Government and Regulatory Bodies

The Indian government and regulatory bodies, such as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), play a pivotal role in shaping the data privacy landscape. Initiatives like the RBI’s data localisation mandate and the forthcoming Digital Personal Data Protection Bill emphasise the importance of protecting consumer data. The establishment of the Data Protection Authority (DPA) will further strengthen the regulatory framework, ensuring compliance and safeguarding consumer interests.

Conclusion

As India’s fintech sector grows, giving importance to data privacy while fostering innovation is critical. At CARD91, we are dedicated to protecting consumer data through privacy-centric practices and robust security measures, ensuring the safety and trust of our customers.

In an era where data is the new currency, excelling in data privacy is not just a legal obligation but a strategic advantage. Fintech companies that prioritise data privacy will build lasting relationships with their customers, driving long-term success in the dynamic Indian fintech landscape.

At CARD91, we are committed to creating a secure and innovative environment for financial technology in India, ensuring a sustainable and trustworthy future for the industry.

Authored by Astha Bishnoi, Manager – Partnership & Sales at CARD91

What is data monetization?

Data Monetization refers to the process of using data to obtain quantifiable economic benefits. Earlier, payment providers were making money from the fees charged to merchants for accepting payments from their customers. But data monetization has become a new business model which generates customer insights from data via advanced analytics to monetize the data itself. 

Let’s get started with example and understand how payment data can be a next big pay off for payment providers-

For example,  large ecommerce companies like Flipkart,Amazon or Myntra, n number of transactions are happening in fraction of seconds. These ecom companies can use their transactional data and create highly differentiated advertisement offerings in real-time bidding situations. Informative data about customer demographics and activity will allow the company to offer differentiated prices.

Another example is, an online classified portal uses algorithms to spot when customers move to a new location. This information can be used by businesses to business partners to offer targeted services.

These examples highlight  how these platforms are taking advantage of new approaches and how they created value for customers along with new revenue streams in a world shaped by technology and data.

For payment providers, this shift towards holistic patterns of payment acceptance, including new softwares and financial services enabling the payment processing fast and are in a step to become a commodity. Leveraging data is a first step in the direction of redefining business models to add new value to their business. 

From payment gateways to issuers, today’s payments providers have a treasure of data at their fingertips.  Data monetization ensures that you get the most value from your data by increasing profit, decreasing costs, and optimizing opportunities for the business.

Data is not the business in the payment industry. However, it’s a resourceful by-product of a business.

It is an asset- which has untapped potential to positively affect your bottom line.

You even have the opportunity to utilize your data to streamline operations, enhance your services and goods, cut costs, and identify new opportunities. Or you can use this data as a new revenue stream, wherein it has its own right that you can sell access to.

How can you monetize data?

As our world has become increasingly data-driven, there has been development of different ways to monetize data. Payment providers are in a distinctly powerful position to capture emerging opportunities as they have deep stats of merchants as well as of the consumers, wherein they can merge these two borders by providing a lucrative incentive to influence consumer’s choice of merchants to extract value through monetized data or through third parties.

Payment providers seek new high revenue streams, many are moving into consumer finance, offering cash advances to merchants, or developing their own business management solution. Payment providers nowadays are filling the gap between merchants and consumers by providing both parties lucrative incentives.

The question arises, how can you monetize the data? One can create revenue from data stats with providers by first identifying what type of data they have, understanding the value of that data of merchants on customers and building sustainable business models to build go to market strategy.

“Payment providers that can find ways to monetize their vast wealth of transaction data can seize a powerful opportunity to differentiate.”- Christian Low

Transactions build great insights around purchasing patterns

Data is created whenever a customer uses a digital payment method, either shopping online or in store purchase. In fact, this transaction data generates variable data points like:

• How much was paid in total?
• How many items were  purchased?
• Where did the transaction take place?
• Total transaction at that store? etc.

Payment providers can also create multi-faceted data which includes detailed analysis of each merchant and its transactional ecosystem.  

Together this collective information from thousands of transactions, conducted by thousands of customers every day, forms a pool of rich connected data points. This entire data set can be used in real time depending on a provider’s infrastructure.

What can be a successful data monetization model?

Payment service providers can improvise the solution using the data of the sector that are currently improving at a radical pace. Fashion is an industry judiciously using these data points. Using the user transaction and order data, they can build a financial scoring model of their customers. This is provided to BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) companies to facilitate them making decisions on providing deferred payments to customers. In another example, online classifieds use algorithms on data points to spot when a customer moves to a new city, which in turn can be used by their B2B partners to offer targeted services, like offers from local businesses.