Credit providers
Credit providers have for some time been subject to heavy regulation in the area of privacy.
They have to comply with both the NPPs and the
special rules about credit information, and the requirements of the two don't always match.
Financial institutions operate in an environment where it is increasingly important to gain benefits from one of their most critical assets - customer information.
They want to maximise sharing of information across corporate groups and maximise opportunities to cross-sell products. The
privacy regime has a significant impact. Among other things, it:
- constrains direct marketing;
- regulates the transfer of personal information to other
countries;
- creates issues with the use of external lists and data bases; and
- requires much more openness in handling personal
information.
Privacy is very important for your customers. The way in which it's handled
is critical for customer relationships, particularly in making customers feel comfortable about moving to new delivery channels.
In any area - from data quality to access and correction - you have to comply with both
the NPPs and with the credit information regime in Part IIIA of the Privacy Act. So you need to know which regime is tougher for any requirement, and meet its standards.
This means undertaking a review and a line-by-line comparison of the two
regimes. It involves tricky analysis and is a time-consuming job.
To help you with
this, here is our analysis of the rules which apply to credit providers in their use of personal information
in addition to the NPPs:
The rest of this site will fill you in on the NPPs and we've produced a
checklist to help you get started.
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