GDPR, HIPAA, SOC, CCPA, ISO – these are just a few of the compliance standards your company must adhere to. After all, violating these legal requirements and industry standards not only comes at a high cost in terms of business disruption and productivity loss, but you also face stiff penalties and reputational damage.
The good news is that there is software available to help you comply. One such software is Intelligent Document Processing (IDP). Learn below how IDP can help your organization meet compliance requirements efficiently and effectively.
Compliance and data protection: important for companies, but why?
Compliance serves as a guide for companies around the world and ensures that the company can be managed in accordance with legal requirements. Compliance is therefore a central aspect of any corporate strategy. Data is the basis for business processes, workflows, applications and ultimately for decision-making. As a compliant company, you must be able to comply with legislation, protect sensitive customer data, and manage risk. The requirements for compliance in companies are high and the processes complex. However, permanent compliance is absolutely essential for lasting business success.
Compliance standards you must adhere to
Data security and compliance have become key components for businesses, the careful handling of sensitive customer data absolutely critical. In order for you to be compliant, regulatory compliance is essential. Generally, companies around the world must adhere to compliance standards. Nevertheless, some industries, such as healthcare and finance, are more affected by regulations than others. The most common international compliance standards when it comes to data privacy and information security include the following:
EU GDPR: With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union (EU) has adopted a law that protects privacy and control over personal data. EU GDPR applies to all companies that collect, store and process personal data of individuals in the EU. GDPR compliance is essential for businesses to avoid significant penalties. Otherwise, and in the event of non-compliance with the EU GDPR, your company risks potential fines of up to 4% of annual turnover or €20 million. With regard to Intelligent Document Processing and the associated training of AI models with personal data, IDP providers and their service providers must comply with EU GDPR.
CCPA: The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the US acts as something like the equivalent of the EU GDPR. CCPA relates to the application of personal data of Californian citizens. CCPA compliance is critical for companies to protect consumer privacy, ensure responsible data handling, and avoid penalties.
HIPAA: Through the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), U.S. federal law governs the privacy, security, and confidentiality of individuals’ health information. HIPAA applies to covered healthcare entities and their business associates. Compliance includes ensuring patient rights and adherence to standardized electronic transactions. The goal of HIPAA is to protect patient privacy, safeguard health information, and promote efficiency in healthcare transactions. Healthcare organizations face stiff penalties for non-compliance with HIPAA.
PCI DSS: The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a requirement for every company that processes, stores or transmits credit card information. PCI DSS therefore affects banks, retailers, service providers and many other companies. PCI DSS requirements extend to a company’s physical and digital infrastructure. All persons involved in the processing of payments must also comply with the standard.
SOC 1/2/3: The System and Organization Controls (SOC) are internationally recognized auditing standards for service providers that process sensitive customer data. For example, a SOC 2 certified Intelligent Document Processing provider is an organization that is able to help its customers meet their compliance obligations while reducing risk by providing secure, intelligent automation solutions.
ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018: Issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), these ISO numbers are a set of information security standards. They allow you to show your customers that you are certified to manage information safely and securely.
CSA STAR: Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), Security Trust, Assurance and Risk (STAR) certification demonstrates that a cloud services provider such as Intelligent Document Processing is in compliance with applicable ISO 27001 regulations and that its security practices meet the requirements.
KYC & AML: Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) are regulations that are mandatory, especially for companies in the banking and financial services sector. The regulatory processes are used to control and minimize fraud, money laundering and financial crime. Banks and financial service providers implement a KYC process to verify the identity of new customers and to prevent fraud. The KYC process is part of the AML regulations.
Data privacy and compliance have become key components for organizations, and we think this trend will only continue to accelerate. – Alain Veuve, Founder and CEO of Parashift
Challenges with compliance standards
Meeting compliance regulations can pose a number of challenges for companies:
Complex regulatory framework: The regulatory environment for compliance is complex and constantly evolving. Companies have to deal with a multitude of laws, regulations and industry standards that vary from country to country. The regulatory environment varies depending on which space your company operates in (such as GDPR and CCPA, or both).
Limited resources: Meeting the regulations requires significant resources, and not just financially, but also in terms of technical and human resources. Smaller companies in particular may find it difficult to provide these resources.
Complex data management: Large volumes of data from multiple sources and in numerous different formats make data management a complex matter. And, as a result, regulatory compliance can be a challenge.
Parashift has addressed these concerns by investing in all sorts of features and technology to make use of its large and quickly growing data-network in the document space all so while maintaining high InfoSec and Compliance standards. – Alain Veuve, Founder and CEO of Parashift
What happens if your company does not adhere to compliance standards?
Various supervisory authorities ensure that companies adhere to their compliance standards. In the EU and for monitoring and ensuring compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), for example, it is the data protection authority. Its main task is to advise companies, handle complaints and conduct audits. This also includes imposing fines if companies fail to comply with the regulations. However, the consequences of non-compliance for your company go far beyond fines and can be fatal:
Business impact: Operating as uninterrupted as possible is what you want for your business. However, a failure to comply can have a notable impact on operations and even result in the temporary closure of your business. As an example: If your company fails to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), you may no longer be able to accept payments via credit cards.
Financial impact: In case of non-compliance, the financial impact can become very serious very quickly. High costs for fines but also loss of revenue can have fatal effects on your finances.
Legal impact: In addition to the financial impact such as lost revenue, legal sanctions against your company will follow if you fail to comply. These steps can result in further high fees, fines or imprisonment, or even property exclusion. If the high costs of the legal proceedings cannot be borne, this can end in the shutdown of the company.
Reputational impact: And last but not least, if compliance standards are not met, your company’s reputation suffers enormously. This can have an impact on the future of your company that should not be underestimated.
Rigorous compliance is thus a top priority, and non-compliance comes with grim consequences and costs. Since much of the regulations involve document and data-based processes, integrating an Intelligent Document Processing solution for compliance helps.
How your company stays compliant thanks to Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)
Intelligent Document Processing (IPD) is a system built on intelligent, AI-based technologies. A modern and advanced IDP solution uses these technologies to automatically capture data from documents, classify them, extract them, and then export them in a structured form to a downstream system (such as your ERP system or even a DMS, CMS, or RPA). IDP’s capabilities help massively with regulatory compliance and industry standards, and provide clear benefits for your business:
- Minimize errors by eliminating manual input: With IDP, manual data input from documents will be eliminated to a large extent in the future. Thanks to the automation of document processing with IDP, your employees only need to intervene manually in exceptional cases. This can be in complex cases or where the system is still unsure of the accuracy of the data. However, this effort is of minimal nature and the error reduction due to a majority of elimination of manual input is enormous. For example, in healthcare, this eliminates the otherwise manual entry of customer data from both typed and handwritten forms. This is fundamentally beneficial with HIPAA regulations in mind.
- Automatic classification and data extraction of all document types: With a modern IDP solution, you are able to automatically classify all document types and extract the data from them. This further ensures fewer manual touch points and has a positive impact on compliance regulations and data security.
- Reduction of internal and external audits:Thanks to the accurate and consistent data extraction by the IDP system, both your internal and external audits will be significantly shortened in the future. This has a positive impact on both effort and cost.
- Protection against fraud: The Intelligent Document Processing solution flags any discrepancies and irregularities it detects during the classification, capture and extraction of data. By automating these tasks, banks, for example, can significantly improve their fraud detection capabilities. Employees are automatically notified of non-compliant activity. The proactive approach helps companies avoid compliance breaches and minimize risks.
- Efficient data management: Managing and organizing relevant data has never been easier than with IDP. Centralized data management makes it easy to find data quickly and supports compliance reporting requirements. In addition, IDP enables efficient searching of data for easy and compliant retrieval of customer information.
- Modern and secure cloud infrastructure: Executives who have concerns about implementing cloud-based systems such as IDP solutions in their organization due to data security and compliance requirements may find these concerns unfounded. First, thanks to advanced cloud computing, data stored in the cloud is now more secure than ever. And second, for reputable Intelligent Document Processing providers in the cloud, compliance standards, data protection and data security are among the very highest priorities.
- EU GDPR compliant Large Language Models for text interpretation: With the combination of Intelligent Document Processing and Large Language Models (LLMs), your organization can use the IDP solution, for example, to check whether contracts meet certain legal requirements or whether invoices contain all the required information. Summarizing documents and interpreting the context is straightforward thanks to the combination of IDP with LLMs.
Insurers and banks can only leverage our IDP cloud platform for their Client Identifying Data (CID) because we’re all in on compliance and infosec. – Alain Veuve, Founder and CEO of Parashift
The right Intelligent Document Processing provider
So the only question that remains is which Intelligent Document Processing solution is the best. A provider like Parashift covers all the benefits described in the previous chapter with regard to compliance standards with its IDP platform: customers worldwide use Parashift for their most sensitive customer data. The platform is fully EU GDPR compliant and has been designed with privacy and security in mind. It runs in ISO27001, ISO27017, ISO27110, ISO27018, SOC 1/2/3, PCI DSS, CSA STAR and HIPAA compliant data centers, making Parashift a secure cloud IDP provider. Your business will benefit from a global service with the highest level of security and continuous software improvements through the cloud SaaS solution.
Furthermore, Parashift is built on proprietary Document Swarm Learning technology, which maximizes continuous AI-based learning across all use cases and customers in a fully GDPR-compliant manner. While other IDP solutions have to learn from hundreds of your documents first, Parashift has already learned from millions of documents – therefore you benefit from a massively reduced time to value.
Parashift is accustomed to handling compliance concerns and governance. Talk to one of our experts about your specific data protection requirements. Or book a demo of the IDP platform and see for yourself how secure and simple it is to use.
