The digitalisation of the credit industry is just beginning
This leading digital lending platform for consumer credit in Europe with an online peer-to-peer loan marketplace was created to offer a means of exchange between people. Its lending platform enables private consumers to borrow from private investors for personal loans, thereby providing debtors a bank-free borrowing system and a return on investment for lenders.
The leading digital lending platform believes in providing more borrowers with the chance to get a loan. This is because it views borrowers more individually than banks. To enable it to do this, the company has developed a unique technology over the years to differentiate credit inquiries and to support its consumer customers responsibly with a loan. Among others, this also includes self-employed people who have been rejected by banks, despite having a sufficiently good credit rating.
The firm uses digital technologies to make it faster and more convenient for customers to get a loan. Customers benefit from products that are consistently tailored to their needs and a completely digital credit experience: from the inquiry to the loan payment. The organisation works on the philosophy that better credit provision for more people is possible.
Compared to other industries the digitalisation of the credit industry is only just beginning and offers enormous potential for growth.
Undertaking manual data discovery and masking procedures
As part of the company’s constant drive to improve its technology and enhance its capabilities the organisation needed to test its technology both for new capabilities and to ensure that there were no performance issues. Since privacy regulations don’t allow the company to use real private data in testing, QA or DevOps environments, this meant that it had to perform manual data discovery and masking procedures in its databases before exposing data to pre-production environments.
These procedures were taking an incredibly long time and were vulnerable to human error, not to mention being extremely expensive. This was affecting the organisation’s ability to meet the goals it had set to launch new technology or to take on new initiatives in a reasonable timeframe.
Additionally, the company needed to unify three data sources into one staging database and mask data in a consistent way. It also needed to identify personal identifiable information (PII) data specific to the Europen Market.
Creating non-sensitive versions of its database
The firm decided that it needed Data Discovery and Data Masking and was looking for a solution that was easy to use and quick to implement, had a simple licensing model and could easily localise personal information (PI). After a thorough review of the market, it selected IT consultancy Northdoor and its Infognito Data Discovery and Masking System.
Infognito allowed the organisation to build automated data discovery and masking processes to prevent sensitive information from leaking into non-production environments. Additionally, the company was able to automate the process of creating a non-sensitive copy of its databases, very quickly and accurately, without violating any privacy regulations and easily localise PII data.
The performance of the solution was important as well as the ability to discover data and the Northdoor system was able to cope with all these demands and it offered a variety of masking methods to meet the needs of the organisation. The non-sensitive copy was automatically sent to the pre-production environment which allows the internal development teams to test data working in the most efficient way.
Additionally, the Northdoor Infognito system allows the company to create non-sensitive copies of its databases easily and as frequently as it needs without incurring any additional costs. All data remains within the company’s domain and the tools are highly scalable and can be used across multiple data sources.
Speeding up time to market
Thanks to Northdoor, this has enabled the leading digital lending company to speed up time to market and deliver new technology capabilities much more quickly. The company can do this in a more efficient and cost-effective way, and it can be confident that it is compliant and not exposing the organisation to any privacy violations which could involve significant fines, not to mention reputational damage to the organisation. Northdoor’s solution provides the firm with the capability to make sure that all personal identifiable information (PII) is protected.
A company representative describes the key benefits of the solution:
“Northdoor’s data discovery and data masking solution has enabled us to rapidly accelerate our testing processes, and this means we can bring new products to market in a faster timeframe. But at the same time, we are assured and confident that we are not breaking any compliance regulations and that we are keeping critical PII and other sensitive data secure.
Anyone undertaking a data masking or data discovery project needs to ensure that the solution they select is easy to implement and use and has the ability to quickly discover data. But they also need to ensure the performance of the system and that it can cope with a variety of masking methods dependent on the organisation’s needs.”