We anonymized the records of nearly one million customers at a specialized financial institution to ensure regulatory compliance.
Sector
Service & Technology
The Challenge
Our client is one of Hungary’s leading specialized financial institutions.
The Hungarian National Bank’s Recommendation 8/2020 (VI. 22.) requires financial institutions to use anonymized data in testing, analysis and development environments — compliance with this is mandatory for our client as well. They selected DSS Consulting for this task thanks to DSS’s proprietary data anonymization solution and decades of experience in the field.
The project focused on the automated recognition of personal data in the databases, and compliance with strict internal data security and bank IT security policies was a prerequisite. Finally, a competitive price was also an important consideration for the client.
The Solution
As a first step, a short pilot preceded the launch of the project, during which time the client’s business needs were finetuned.
At the start of the project, DSS Data Anonym‘s data recognition module performed a batch scan of the bank’s databases to identify and collect database tables and columns containing personal data.
Following user validation, DSS performed data anonymization on these fields containing personal data, with specific parameterization adapted to the bank’s own systems and processes.
The most challenging part of the project was working in a highly regulated environment with strict banking IT security regulations. This required remote work – DSS staff did not visit the bank in person at any time during the project.
Technology
DSS Data Anonym, Oracle, MSSQL, Postgre SQL
The Result
Following the pilot phase, we completed the anonymization of the entire customer database – containing 900,000 customer records and 8,500,000 fields (company name, address, tax ID, company registration number, etc.) – within three months, resulting in an anonymized environment completely identical to the production environment.
Thanks to the anonymized environment, statistics and reports that comply with data protection requirements yet remain representative can be generated in an auditable and reproducible manner.
Following the completion of the project, we continue to provide ongoing support and maintenance services.
As our client’s lead expert on the project put it, “During the pilot project and the implementation, the cooperation with DSS was exemplary. When we needed technical support, the DSS team was at our disposal almost immediately, fully assisting us with solutions, suggestions, advice and quick fixes. Working together in the online space caused no problems or slowdowns during the implementation. Although we never met in person, we were able to work together very well throughout the project. DSS’s attitude throughout was positive, supportive and innovative.”
