About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

General Data Protection Regulation – The Time to Implement is Now

Subscribe to our newsletter

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is broad, rigorous and challenging – and its compliance deadline is just 12 months away. So, how are organisations responding to the regulation, what progress are they making on implementation and what steps can they take to ensure compliance within the 12-month timeframe.

These questions and more were answered in a recent A-Team Group webinar asking ‘Are you ready for GDPR?’. The webinar was hosted by A-Team editor Sarah Underwood and joined by Michael Dimopoulos, a GDPR practitioner assigned to a Tier 1 European bank; Christy Haragan, principal sales engineer at MarkLogic; Tudor Borlea, pre-sales engineer at Collibra; and Michael Angle, chief technology officer at Opus.

Setting the scene for discussion, an early audience poll questioning organisations’ progress on GDPR showed 42% of respondents at the planning stage, 27% just starting implementation, 18% not yet making progress, and 13% making significant progress. Considering the 25 May 2018 compliance deadline of the regulation, the speakers agreed that if organisations within the scope of GDPR have not yet started work on compliance, they should not delay and get going straight away. The challenges of compliance are considerable, and it will take a lot of time and effort to identify personal date, gain and document the consent of data owners – essentially EU citizens – to use the data, and embed policies and practices to deal with data owners’ rights, such as data access and corrections, data portability, and the right to be forgotten. Firms based outside the EU, but with EU customers, must also comply with GDPR.

A second audience poll reflected these challenges, showing respondents expecting to, or experiencing, GDPR data management challenges including establishing customer consent management, identifying private and protected data, and building data privacy by design as required by the regulation. The speakers added compliance challenges presented by data silos, problems around accessing and managing unstructured data, and the ability to scale systems to deal with data subjects requests in a timely manner.

Solutions to these problems include a step-by-step approach to GDPR implementation that starts with a data inventory and goes on to document consent from data owners, map data to systems where it is used, encrypt data where necessary, and ensure compliant data can be given to data subjects on request. A shift in culture around how employees collect customer data is also recommended.

While no single technology solution is expected to provide an answer to all the data management challenges of GDPR, the speakers suggested organisations should start conversations with technology providers now with a view to implementing solutions in the second half of the year.

Final advice included getting board level sponsorship for GDPR programmes, making all required efforts to avoid potentially huge fines for non-compliance, and collaborating across the enterprise to achieve success. And start now!

Listen to the webinar to find out about:

  • GDPR obligations
  • Scope of the regulation
  • Data management challenges
  • Implementation plans
  • Beneficial outcomes
Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Addressing conduct risk: approaches to surveillance

Conduct risk in financial services is a critical area that requires vigilant monitoring and robust surveillance mechanisms. Regulatory bodies, (FCA, FINRA and others) have tightened their scrutiny and financial institutions must adopt advanced approaches to effectively manage and mitigate conduct risk. This webinar will examine the latest methodologies and technologies used to address conduct risk,...

BLOG

Accelex Says its AI Agent Can Tame The ‘Nastiest’ Corner of Data Management

Unstructured data is the bugbear of private market data managers, but one of the latest entrant to the space claims to have a solution that can tame the “nastiest” part of data retrieval – private market fund quarterly reports. Accelex is a London-based artificial intelligence (AI) focussed FinTech that has launched a platform that can prise market-relevant...

EVENT

AI in Capital Markets Summit New York

The AI in Capital Markets Summit will explore current and emerging trends in AI, the potential of Generative AI and LLMs and how AI can be applied for efficiencies and business value across a number of use cases, in the front and back office of financial institutions. The agenda will explore the risks and challenges of adopting AI and the foundational technologies and data management capabilities that underpin successful deployment.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...