In this day and age, data sharing is part of doing business. Between salesforce/marketo/etc, AWS, external administrators, the ATO and a bunch of others I can’t think of right now, it’s just the way that we do business. Having absolutely everything ‘on prem’ (on premises) went out the window years ago.

Even APRA assumes that super funds will share data, and has an entire paper dedicated to the subject.

Having said all that, it’s right to be cautious and take a risk-based approach when considering new data-sharing arrangements, such as Wattletree. Read on to learn more about how Wattletree approaches both the legals and IT security side of things.

PS: think someone else might enjoy this newsletter? Feel free to forward it to them or encourage them to sign up here.

PPS: Who else had first day of NSW home schooling today? I thought I had it all sorted but on reflection, I think I managed about 3 hours of actual work. Oh well, tomorrow is another day right???

The obvious question – IT Security

How and where are you storing our precious information? How is it secured? How do we know it’s safe? How is all this tested?

All good questions my friends. We’ve prepared a Security Explainer to answer some of these questions. It doesn’t cover everything of course, but it gives you an overview of what is in place to carefully and securely manage the data that you entrust us with.

Luckily, Marketsoft (who co-own Wattletree alongside Mayflower) are experts in this area and have been at it for 30 years. In fact, they already store some 14 million unique customer records in Lemontree, which is the Wattletree equivalent in the NFP space.

The less obvious but frankly more important question

What legal restrictions are in place to support the safe sharing of insights (but NOT raw data) between institutions? And how can we be sure that Wattletree is being built for the common good? That everyone who participates will benefit?

Now, I don’t think these sort of questions are asked enough. But I’m going to answer anyway! In fact, we have gone so far as to include a preamble in the Wattletree legal agreement that reads:

Wattletree exists to allow issuers and distributors of financial products to meet their compliance obligations and to build better products and services for their customers. Member firms share information about their own customers in order to benefit from both Wattletree’s data sets as well as information provided by other members. In turn, members understand that information they hold about customers will be used to inform decision-making in other member firms. By sharing data, Wattletree is able to provide all member firms with more insights than would otherwise be available. Wattletree will never use the data provided for any purpose other than supporting member firms to manage their businesses and deliver better outcomes to consumers.

By setting out our intentions up front and having all parties agree to them, we can ensure that Wattletree really will be that rare beast, a company that exists solely to deliver better outcomes for each of the member companies and their customers. Which I’d like to think is something we can all get behind 🙂

Let’s talk

If there’s a burning DDO question that no-one seems to have a good answer to, or you just need to understand how Wattletree works in more detail, please get in touch. I invite you to shoot through your Q’s using the below form or alternatively you can call me on 0417 970 818. There’s no such thing as a silly question*

*OK, we all know that’s rubbish but you know what I mean!

Cheers, Sarah

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