Security And Compliance Shift From Barriers To Competitive Advantages

In A Decade of Digital Transformation in 12 Months, 46 C-suite executives spoke with PYMNTS for its Q2 eBook on what the world will look like as recovery rolls on and the next iteration of normal rolls out. In this excerpt, Mahmoud Abdelkader, CEO of Very Good Security, explores how the “Zero Data approach” can help companies embrace digital products and services amid increasing security threats and regulations.

Read the entire eBook here.

The past year has been a sea change for eCommerce payments and aligned sectors, and will be looked back on as just the preamble for an era of unprecedented investment, growth and innovation for the digital economy. The barriers for any company to become a digitally native company – and for any digitally native company to become a FinTech company – have never been lower. Firms are bringing payment processing in-house, aggregating their information, issuing cards and pushing funds in faster, more meaningful ways than ever before. Elsewhere, the once-nascent fields of digital medicine and telemedicine are now sectors in their own right.

While tremendous opportunity exists, a great leveling is occurring where young and old entrants into this space are confronting opportunity costs that impact time to market and developer resources in a new way. Low barriers to entry mean strong competition at all levels. The firms that will thrive in this new environment understand that time to market following proof of concept will make or break an offering. The difference between having a competitive edge and lagging behind is now a matter of months or even weeks.

Several years ago, liabilities around compliance and data security were a chief suppressor of potential market entrants and product development. While security threats and compliance requirements continue to escalate, some forward-thinking companies are accelerating the delivery of new digital products and services with what we call the “Zero Data approach.” With this approach, companies can decouple the business value of sensitive data from the related security and compliance liabilities and risks. This approach replaces sensitive information with aliases, allowing firms to use aliased data freely without ever accessing the raw data. Avoiding the acceptance, storage or transmission of sensitive data significantly reduces time and cost in areas like building in-house security and PCI compliance.

With Zero Data, customers retain control of their information and can use their data in new and innovative ways to grow top-line, understand the market, reduce costs and improve customer experiences. One example of harnessing this data is through payment optimization, where firms can strategically direct payment transactions across multiple processors to realize efficient pricing, instant payouts or direct volume toward processors that specialize in a certain vertical.

With Zero Data, security and compliance are no longer hurdles to get over or time-to-market roadblocks, but competitive differentiators in a competitive space. Let’s all welcome the global digital economy to the 21st century.