By Jaeger Glucina, MD and Chief of Staff, Luminance 

If you’re in the UK, you could hardly have missed the story this summer about Nigel Farage’s public showdown with the specialist bank Coutts. What started as an apparent complaint about a lack of service being provided to Farage quickly became a significant political talking point and, ultimately, resulted in the CEO of the NatWest-owned bank resigning his position.

However, if your work sees you taking responsibility for security, compliance, and business continuity, you may need to take stock of how this story highlights an approaching risk factor that all companies need to be aware of. While the details of Coutt’s decision to drop Farage as a customer were being launched onto the newspapers’ front pages, the actual way in which Farage obtained that information remained very much a secondary story.

Those details were obtained when Farage lodged a data subject access request, or ‘DSAR’, with Coutts. This legal mechanism, introduced as part of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, compels organisations to identify, compile, and share every piece of information that they hold relating to an individual. This could range from basic data like names and addresses in a customer database to internal email or text conversations pertaining to them.

The purpose, as with analogous legislation like the California Consumer Privacy Act, is to tip the scales of power around matters of data and privacy back in favour of the consumer. To achieve that, there is real regulatory muscle to ensure that DSARs are acted on. Upon receipt, organisations must respond within thirty days, and non-compliance can carry a fine of up to 4% of the business’s annual global turnover.

The reputational damage that a DSAR could trigger for some businesses should, by now, be readily apparent. Even benign requests can pose a serious challenge to an organisation’s legal resource.

While the potentially punitive results of non-compliance makes DSARs a priority issue, mounting a response is not easy as you might think. The breadth of the request demands an exhaustive and wide-ranging search through information systems, including records of Slack messages and video calls as well as emails, documents, spreadsheets, and databases. At the same time, of course, our usage of such systems is ever-expanding. Every new productivity tool in an organisation’s arsenal will represent a potential landing point for sensitive data which needs to be collated, analysed and appropriately redacted in a DSAR process.

You can imagine that for legal teams this is an onerous workload which saps capacity from higher-value areas of work that drive business growth. Worse, it is a highly labour-intensive, repetitive process which few legal professionals would ideally choose to engage in. Many external firms won’t take DSAR cases on, and if one can be found the fees will likely run to tens of thousands of pounds.

All of that adds up to a growing need for a new kind of data discoverability: not just a way for businesses to oversee data siloes, but to analyse and draw from them in a highly specific way which meets strict legal criteria.

Clearly, the repetitive and precise nature of the task makes it a perfect candidate for automation. With AI, teams can rapidly cull datasets down to just those items which are likely to be relevant before identifying any personal data which needs to be excluded or redacted. In one recent rollout of the technology, this resulted in UK-based technology scale-up, proSapient, halving the time taken to respond to a DSAR and avoiding £20k in costs while maintaining the robust level of detail which GDPR compliance demands.

Any data professional out there knows that a proliferation of personal data residing in systems is an almost inevitable consequence of our modern working practices: digital tools underpin our productivity, and information about people, whether they are customers, clients, or employees, is relevant to almost any process.

Anecdotally, we know that whenever a story involving DSARs hits the headlines, businesses experience a spike of requests. The GDPR may now be half a decade old, but awareness of how it can be leveraged will only continue to grow – far past the capacity of existing tools and team structures to cope.

That means that empowering legal teams with the tools they need manage this new data reality is of paramount importance, both to safeguard the organisation’s future resilience and continuity, and to enable them to focus on delivering the levels of productivity expected from them.