Can Customer Privacy Become A Market Differentiator?

Kasia Gawlik, Customer Data & Privacy Director at Standard Chartered, discusses the intersection of customer privacy, data management, and trust as a market advantage.

“Organisational ability to demonstrate trustworthiness and engage with customers around their data may be an important market differentiator and a key to success. Still, this challenge is not trivial. It requires merging the perspectives and organisational silos that otherwise rarely intersect: legal compliance and customer experience design and marketing,” says Kasia Gawlik, Customer Data & Privacy Director at Standard Chartered.

As the Customer Data Privacy Director, Kasia is responsible for delivering customer privacy management capabilities that support the business. Her role encompasses overseeing all aspects of data privacy throughout the customer journey, from providing accurate information and managing data collection to handling customer consent and executing data subjects’ rights, including the “right to be forgotten.”

Kasia discusses the intersection of customer privacy, data management, and trust as a market advantage. She addresses the complexities AI brings to BFSI operations, the ongoing struggle with data silos, and the need for a transparent, empowered approach to customer data to enhance business insights and customer experience.

Excerpts from the interview:

What is the biggest CX challenge and opportunity in your industry?

Since 2018 GDPR came into force, most companies have achieved a certain level of data privacy standards to comply with the requirements. Now, it is time to leverage this and elevate it to the tangible customer value proposition. Customer privacy can become a real market advantage since it allows building solid and trusted relationships. Customers have become more and more cautious about the security and privacy of their data.

Combined with ever-higher regulatory standards, this may pose a real challenge for those who want to use customer data. Organisational ability to demonstrate trustworthiness and engage with customers around their data may be an essential market differentiator and a key to success.

Still, this challenge is not trivial. It requires merging the perspectives and organisational silos that otherwise rarely intersect: legal compliance and customer experience design and marketing. On top of those two poles is a third actor without whom success wouldn’t be possible: enterprise data architects. We need to elaborate on the new ways of organising and facilitating work to make this dialogue and cooperation possible.

How do you see generative AI impacting BFSI operations?

Whatever our opinion on AI’s value and impact, we still need to prepare. Using AI poses severe and new challenges to data management, especially data ethics and privacy. It requires new procedures for assessing data, processing activities and their applications, and many people to secure them. Apart from operations related directly to AI-powered services, organisations must be ready for increased operations related to data.

Many BFSI brands are still struggling to extract the right insights from their data. What are the common barriers?

Nowadays, big, complex organisations (and BFSI is no different from the rest of them) process tons of data related to their customers. In line with organisational complexity, the data landscape is similarly complicated and often hazy. It is really hard to get insight from siloed data.

Another challenge is data quality. The easier it is to collect the data (and today, it is really easy), the less critical and selective we are towards the data itself and operations conducted on it. Maintaining high data quality requires constant attention and the implementation of relevant procedures. Proper data collection does not guarantee its high quality after being processed.

How should brands balance customer empowerment with the need for data to drive business insights?

In my opinion, this isn’t an actual opposition. Getting to know customers and collecting data on them cannot be a form of constraint or ruse. If companies try to force customers to share their data, customers will find a way to resist. This means an arms race that no one wants.

An alternative lies in partnership. Customers should be empowered to share their data for their benefit. This will happen if companies really use the data for their customers’ benefit and are able to communicate how they use the data. This requires transparency, raising awareness, and even more customer empowerment.