In the face of rising regulatory scrutiny, complex data ecosystems, and growing cyber threats, banks and financial institutions must reimagine how they manage risk and compliance. Traditional approaches—manual, siloed, and reactive—no longer suffice. This checklist offers a practical, forward-thinking framework to proactively identify, reduce, and respond to risk while ensuring regulatory alignment. BigID helps financial services organizations put this checklist into action at scale with AI-powered data discovery, classification, and policy automation.
1. Discover and Inventory All Sensitive and Regulated Data
Identify where all personal, financial, and regulated data resides—structured, unstructured, and in motion.
How to do it:
Start with automated, deep data discovery across all your environments: on-premises databases, cloud storage, data lakes, SaaS apps, and collaboration tools. Build a centralized, searchable inventory of customer PII, payment data (PCI), financial records (GLBA), and other regulated categories. Extend this discovery to cover dark data, shadow IT, and stale datasets that often escape audits.
Why it matters:
You can’t protect or govern what you can’t find. Hidden or unknown data poses some of the greatest compliance and breach risks, especially under regulations like GDPR, CPRA, GLBA, and NYDFS. A complete and up-to-date data inventory is the foundation for every risk, security, and compliance initiative.
How BigID helps:
BigID creates a unified view of sensitive data, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data in on-prem environments and across the cloud. Leverage BigID’s advanced ML and AI to automatically discover, classify, categorize, tag, and label sensitive data with accuracy, granularity, and scale.
2. Classify Data by Risk, Sensitivity, and Compliance Requirements
Classify data not just by type, but by risk profile, business context, and compliance mandate.
How to do it:
Move beyond regex-based pattern matching. Use advanced classification techniques to identify sensitive attributes (e.g., account numbers, SSNs), data subject types (customers, employees), and regulatory categories (e.g., SOX, GLBA, PCI). Incorporate business context to distinguish between high- and low-risk uses of similar data.
Why it matters:
Different types of data carry different levels of risk. Misclassified data can lead to overexposure, compliance violations, or wasted security resources. Accurate classification ensures tailored protections, reporting, and remediation strategies based on data criticality.
How BigID helps:
BigID leverages ML-driven classification, document fingerprinting, NLP, and context-aware rules to provide precise, multi-dimensional classification at scale. This enables banks to distinguish between sensitive data used in production vs. test environments, or personal data vs. anonymized data.
3. Automate Compliance Monitoring and Policy Enforcement
Align data governance with regulatory mandates through automated policy application and continuous monitoring.
How to do it:
Define data handling policies that map to requirements under laws like GLBA, CPRA, NYDFS Part 500, and Basel III. Apply those policies consistently across your data landscape. Continuously monitor data for policy violations—such as exposed PII in unprotected locations—and trigger alerts or remediation actions as needed.
Why it matters:
Regulatory frameworks are becoming more data-centric and demanding around real-time compliance. Manual audits or static reports are insufficient. Banks need continuous visibility into their compliance posture and the ability to take corrective action at scale.
How BigID helps:
With BigID, organizations can enforce and manage hundreds of out-of-the-box policies to monitor data by sensitivity, regulation, residency, location, and more – and trigger controls for compliance with NIST, CISA, PCI, privacy, security, and AI frameworks. Additionally, organizations can automate compliance with end-to-end privacy and security capabilities to protect personal, sensitive, and regulated data.
4. Prioritize and Reduce Risk with Data-Centric Intelligence
Assess your data risk exposure and take action to mitigate it.
How to do it:
Build a risk register that factors in data type, volume, sensitivity, location, and access permissions. Identify risky data concentrations—such as unencrypted PII in cloud shares or passwords stored in plain text. Prioritize risk based on business impact, compliance implications, and exposure level.
Why it matters:
Not all risks are created equal. Prioritizing remediation efforts based on the actual risk data helps teams reduce the most critical threats first and allocate resources more effectively.
How BigID helps:
With BigID, financial service organizations can manage, delegate, and execute deletion to accelerate minimization initiatives and enforce retention policies. BigID allows businesses to clean up duplicate, similar, and redundant information that likely poses a security risk. Organizations can reduce their attack surface — or the number of vulnerable touchpoints in the event of a breach.
5. Enable Privacy Rights, Consent Management, and Incident Response
Operationalize data rights, incident response, and consent across all systems.
How to do it:
Implement workflows to manage data subject rights (DSARs), including access, deletion, and correction requests. Ensure consent signals are respected across all systems where customer data is used. Build playbooks for data breaches and regulatory inquiries with clear visibility into impacted records and response timelines.
Why it matters:
Customer trust and regulatory penalties are at stake. Failing to respond to data rights requests or data breaches in a timely, accurate way can cost banks millions in fines and reputation.
How BigID helps:
BigID’s identity-aware breach analysis strategically assesses the scope and magnitude of data breaches. Quickly and accurately detect and investigate breach impact, facilitate prompt incident response, and notify relevant authorities and affected consumers. Generate automated reports for regulators and auditors to meet breach notification requirements and ensure compliance.
Take the Next Step with BigID
Risk and compliance are no longer check-the-box exercises for financial institutions—they’re central to trust, resilience, and long-term growth. BigID’s data intelligence platform is purpose-built to help banks and financial institutions tackle these challenges with confidence, automation, and scale.
With BigID, financial organizations gain clarity, control, and confidence in managing sensitive data—turning risk into resilience and compliance into competitive advantage.
To see how BigID can help fill the gaps in your organization’s security— book a 1:1 demo with our experts today.
