Fintech companies are quickly becoming the backbone of every individual's buying and investing habits. It has already revamped the ways in which the banking services are being offered to its customers and soon seems like it will take over the other financial segments as well.

What Fintechs are doing are not trying to replace banks but become a better version of it, so as the traditional banks now have a bully in their playground.

With such an easy and accessible nature of these fintech companies, everyone's personal data is at risk. This dark side of the industry is often neglected or underrepresented in the current rhetoric around digitalization of financial products and services.

Currently, the entire debate is about traditional and modern technologies and other disruptions by Fintechs rather than the important aspects of ownership and consumer rights on data.

Ethics, Regulations and Compliance

While there are many regulations around the ownership of data in the varied market around the world, but there is no common framework like CRS in taxation or GDPR for Data Policies in the EU. There are also a good set of companies looking at helping these fintech companies with good governance and regulatory compliance.

We have also seen a vast majority of these companies make their big buck by information brokerage. For example, those apps which offer you instant credits are just aggregators for multiple other financial companies with whom this app shares that data with. Data moves freely in such cases but not the responsibility.

It would also be interesting to know how these companies will find loopholes in the system for an exploitative use of sensitive customer data. For example, Know Your Customer regulations and Anti-Money Laundering and Anti-terrorist financing regulations makes traditional banks less inclined to provide financial services to certain parts of the market. FinTechs have yet to be fully regulated by these laws.

Customer-first should be the motto of every fintech out there. When the customer is truly first their data should be companies responsibility and they should handle it ethically.

Right now the world of tech is looking for ways to protect user data with companies like Apple heavily pushing the secure narrative but does this affects the real world is yet to be seen.