Getting a customer to place their private data — and their money — in your FinTech app requires an incredible amount of trust on their part. For the convenience of being able to use your service, they hand over personally identifiable information such as payment information, financial history, bank account login details, Social Security numbers, and much more. In short, customers hand over the keys to their accounts.

In return, your company will know what the customer spends on or invests in, how much they save or consume, how often they get paid, and any number of variables depending on what type of FinTech service your company provides. And depending on what software is used in your company, that could mean customer data is shared with third-party services in order to score, rate, or rank customers in anything from loan applications to job interviews.

How to fix data privacy

1. Adhere to Security Best Practices
Best practices had better include writing secure code, using encryption, using only authorized APIs, exercising caution in the usage of third-party code libraries, only storing crucial information, and forcing the use of complex passwords or 2-Factor Authentication. The point is: data privacy begins with the first line of code written for an app and extends to how you store and access customer data.

2. Create better collaborations in the Industry
None of this will work without industry stakeholders teaming up to improve both the guidelines and the technical standards that govern the access and storage of consumer data in the financial services vertical. The idea is to build a more secure, more unified experience for the end-user — whether you’re their bank, insurance app, budgeting app, mobile payment service, or blockchain app.

3. Educate Your Users & Give Them Control
From a customer-facing standpoint, there has to be an increased effort to educate users and make them aware of how your FinTech software or app works. In short, tell them how your software or app accesses, collects, stores use, and shares their personal and financial data.

Sure, this is all laid out in your user agreement, privacy policy, terms of service, and security documents. But seriously, who reads those? Busy customers don’t have the time or the desire to do so. You’ll have to be purposeful about teaching them about what you do using slick marketing tactics and omnichannel strategies — content marketing, social media, emails, website, notifications, and whatever other channels your audience uses.

Because for many regular users, financial technology is a mystery. But the fact that they’re using your services means they’re willing to step into your world and use your services, and may want to learn more about it. Use layman’s terms then to teach them about:

• What they should do to keep their accounts safe and secure
• What security you have in place to protect customer data
• What type of data your FinTech software collects
• Whether their data is sold or shared with other companies, and why
• What a user can do to control the collection of data

Customers have pretty straightforward expectations when it comes to data privacy. Basically, they want to be able to control access to their information.

4. Rally for Secure APIs
Within the FinTech industry, there is room for better and more widespread usage of secure APIs (application programming interfaces). In simplest terms, instead of a user logging into his bank account in order to permit a FinTech app to use it for payment, secure APIs could be set up between the bank and the FinTech service allowing a user to control which software or apps can access their bank account. And therefore, no need to let yet another software or app know what your username or password combination is.

But in order for these secure APIs to be created and work seamlessly, you will need a team effort from all involved, which brings us to the last element.

Yo! Payments offers a rich API that enables seamless integration with websites, IVR services, SMS services, and any other medium through which businesses interact with their customers. Yo! Payments also offer an “internal transfer” service that enables account holders to cheaply transfer funds amongst each other.

Yo! Payments’ mission is to interconnect all mobile money providers and financial institutions WORLDWIDE, and provide Yo! Payments account holders with a unified method of receiving payments from any customer subscribed to any mobile money service provider or financial institution. What this means is that we intend to enable a Yo! Payments account holders to receive payments from their customers using MTN Mobile Money of MTN Uganda, M-PESA of Safaricom Kenya, or M-PESA of Tanzania, as well as send funds to mobile money subscribers of any network.

Yo! Payments opens the door for all types of businesses to benefit from the highly successful mobile money phenomenon. Start receiving mobile money payments for your services TODAY!

There are 3 simple steps to becoming a Yo! Payments account holder, as below:

• Go to the Yo! Payments Website
• Accept the Service Terms
• Sign Up for an account.

Having completed the signup process, you are ready to transact with your Yo! Payments account! Note that by default, after completing the signup process, a Personal Account shall be created for your use automatically. You may upgrade your account to a Business Account by uploading scanned copies of the following documents to your account using the “Upload Document” feature in your account. Below is the list of documents required:

• Scanned Copy of your Business’ Certificate of Incorporation or Equivalent Legal Document
• Scanned Copy of a Proof-of-Address Document, in your Business’ name. For example, you may upload a recent utility bill (Electricity or Water) or your Trading License, if it indicates the location of your premises
• Scanned Copy of Company Form 7 Clearly showing a list of Directors and their Addresses.
• Signed letter on your company’s headed paper from the Managing Director authorizing use of the service (email payments@yo.co.ug for the draft)
• Ifyou require access to the API, a signed Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) (email payments@yo.co.ug for the draft)
• BriefDescription of the Products and Services you intend to offer using the Business Account. For this, you may upload a PDF document with the information.

When done, send an email to the address payments@yo.co.ug. The subject of your email should be “Upgrade to Business Account”. Upgrade from a Personal Account to a Business Account takes no more than one business day.