Know Your customer industry is becoming saturated with KYC service providers that claim to provide top notch ID verification and identity authentication services to their customers. But such KYC service provider are fast becoming a vulnerability for their customers ever since GDPR was put in effect in the summer of 2018.
With the crucial nature of personal information that is collected by identity verification services on behalf of their customers for authentication of credentials of end-users, non-compliance to GDPR can really hurt the reputation of a business, both in terms of financial losses and any bad publicity that might accompany these losses. So in order to better facilitate, their customers KYC software must follow these 3 steps to ensure that their ID Verification platform never becomes a source of embarrassment for their customers. But before that, let us give you a little background about the scope of GDPR and what it entails for businesses in general:
GDPR was issued by the European Union for the protection of personal data of their citizens and to ensure fair usage of personal information collected from these citizens. They require businesses to collect consent of users before any personal data is collected from them and also explain explicit reasons why that personal information is required by the businesses. Additionally, businesses have to ensure that the collected information of their users is used only and only for the reasons explained to them.
There are many other instructions that businesses have to follow but surely we can not explain all of them, even briefly, in this short post. But if you are a KYC service provider and are offering Know Your Customer services to your customers, then you have to follow these 3 steps to make sure that you are fully compliant to GDPR guidelines:
Collect Consent of Users
You need to put a disclaimer before starting your ID verification process, that an end-user will be asked to provide their personal information during the authentication procedure. Ask them, do they agree to provide their personal information to you for verification purposes. It is also important that you explicitly explain to end-user, that the collected information will only be used to validate their identity.
Secure collected Data
All the collected personal information should be kept in a secure and hard to breach database. Any successful attempt to hack the personal information of end-users can prove to be highly controversial and can even lead to multi-million dollar fine for your ID verification platform slapped by EU authorities.
Be Ready for Data Removal
GDPR allows end-users to request from a service provider to delete all the personal information they might have collected from them. So whether you are offering KYC for banks or providing ID verification to an e-commerce website, always be ready to delete the personal data you might have collected during a Know your customer process.
For more details that how a KYC service provider can align its services with GDPR
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