Bringing Focus to Information Governance for Credit Unions

As credit unions consider growing data practices, compliance hazards, economic uncertainties and additional member banking environment issues, 2020 could serve as a new era within information governance for the whole industry.

Credit unions can choose to make information governance a priority. “They have the opportunity to enter a new decade with their special member-owner philosophy — all while continuing to do what’s right for their institutions and members,” Martinez-Carey, founder and principal of Alt + F0, an IG solutions provider dedicated to helping credit unions manage and leverage member data, said. “Information governance is at the heart of these principles and stands ready to help credit unions and their members going forward.”

Information Governance described as an emerging “super discipline” now being applied to electronic document and records management, email, social media, cloud computing, mobile computing, and the management and output of information organization-wide, according to Robert F. Smallwood, who literally wrote the book (“Information Governance: Concepts, Strategies, and Best Practices”) about IG in 2014.

Sovan Bin, CEO and founder of Paris and San Francisco-based Odaseva, which offers Data Governance Cloud, a suite of apps for large enterprises, explained, “Information governance is about making deliberate decisions about how your organization plans to holistically manage the business-critical information that it generates and ultimately relies upon for business-critical applications,”

“Financial institutions and credit unions should be concerned with information governance as it is a strategy for managing information throughout its lifecycle. Information governance is especially critical for financial institutions and credit unions due to the sensitive customer data that they are entrusted with securing and managing,” Chris Hertz, chief risk officer, of the cybersecurity firm DivvyCloud, which allows customers to automate governance of their cloud and container infrastructure, said.

According to Martinez-Carey, very few credit unions nationally — especially small to medium asset-size institutions — recognize and understand what information governance is and how it relates to their members. Credit unions will have to play catch up to other industries already applying information governance, she advised. “Anchored by the industry’s people helping people philosophy, credit unions will want to begin using information governance to their advantage as they face competition from fintechs, banks, and the scrutiny of data management and security by regulators and auditors.”

Read more about information governance in the Feb. 26 issue of CU Times.