How securing Workday compliance gives financial services a competitive edge
Financial services face numerous challenges, from changing market conditions and customer needs to evolving compliance rules. Traditional institutions must adapt to keep pace with fintech startups and non-traditional players, embracing technological advancements and meeting customer preferences. To succeed in this dynamic landscape, financial organisations must differentiate themselves, offer unique value propositions, and compete effectively. Economic and market conditions further influence financial services, with recessions, interest rate fluctuations, geopolitical events, and regulatory changes impacting operations and profitability.
Digital transformation is a crucial journey for financial organisations, but they must also evolve their product stack and partnerships to maximise their investments. Workday offers agility, adaptability, and proactive approaches to digital transformation. To effectively implement and leverage Workday, financial services organisations must consider how to automate data access controls to ensure integrity and improve efficiency due to the industry’s highly regulated nature.
In this article, Kim Freestone, Principal Product Manager at Kainos, explores strategies to overcome these challenges. Discover how organisations can leverage Workday and Kainos Smart Shield to enhance operational efficiency, decision-making capabilities, and maintain a competitive edge in the industry.
Implement data access controls for stronger Workday security and compliance
Achieving Workday compliance requires the implementation of strong security measures. It is crucial that financial organisations consider how to integrate existing security measures and maintain strict access controls to ensure sensitive customer and financial data is secure and compliant with privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA.
Smart Shield, an intelligent data masking solution tailored for Workday environments, supports compliance with data privacy regulations. It enables the masking of sensitive fields like revenue, profit, loss, accounting, invoices, and ESG data within Workday. By limiting access to financial performance and accounting records, Smart Shield helps mitigate risks such as insider trading, loss of competitive advantage, fraud, and non-compliance with regulations like SOX, SOC 1 and 2, UK MAR and EU MAR. With Smart Shield, organisations can safeguard sensitive personal and business-critical data in the Workday non-production environment. Smart Shield acts as a secure layer reducing privacy risk while ensuring minimal impact on user productivity.
Ensure regulatory compliance and robust data protection when testing Workday
Financial services operate within a framework of regulations and compliance requirements, including Basel ΙΙI, SOX or MiFID II. Workday’s compliance capabilities ensures adherence to various regulatory requirements such as data protection, privacy laws, anti-money laundering regulations and financial reporting standards. By effectively managing compliance within Workday, organisations can reduce risks, avoid penalties, and establish a solid foundation for future digital initiatives without compromising their compliance obligations.
Testing Workday is vital, and often conducted using real data. Typically, this occurs as an organisation approaches its initial go-live or when new features and functionality are ready to be deployed. However this poses a significant data-privacy control gap, especially when organisations have numerous individuals involved in testing, with full access to company data. It is crucial to grant teams access to the necessary data for effective testing while strictly limiting their access sensitive information.
Empowering teams to utilise all features and functionalities after major and minor software updates while restricting visibility of sensitive information is essential. Smart Shield ensures that financial organisations maintain compliance, enabling them to confidently expand their workforce, introduce new product lines, or enter new markets, knowing that Workday is secure and adaptable.
Streamline sensitive data access management with Smart Shield
Financial organisations handle vast and diverse datasets from various sources, posing challenges in managing, organising, and maintaining the quality, accuracy, and integrity across different systems. Achieving compliance with Workday involves implementing necessary controls and processes to ensure data security, privacy and regulatory adherence.
Collaboration with external vendors, partners, and third-party service providers is common for financial institutions, necessitating measures to safeguard data during these collaborations, establish data sharing agreements, and monitor third-party data handling practices. Elevated access to non-production tenants can expose users to confidential data they don't need. Ensure peace of mind when granting elevated permission to implementation and support for non-production tenants without granting visibility to company records.
Smart Shield offers data masking capabilities for sensitive business data, including HCM, Financials, Payroll, Benefits, Recruiting, and Talent Management. With the ability to apply different masking rules for groups or individual users, Smart Shield supports all non-production environments such as Sandbox, Sandbox Preview and Implementation tenants. Its easy setup provides reassurance to finance, HR, audit and IT functions, as well as third-party partners supporting Workday. It puts organisations back in control of their data, enabling them to optimise Workday usage, drive innovation and maintain privacy. By establishing compliant and automated processes, financial services organisations can allocate resources towards innovation and digital initiatives and improving customer experiences.
Leverage Smart Shield’s configurable data masking during deployments or expansions
Financial services often possess unique business processes and complex legacy systems and data structures. Integrating these systems with Workday and customising the platform to meet specific industry requirements can be challenging and time-consuming. Throughout an organisations Workday journey, various users will access non-production tenants for different tasks. To prevent malicious or accidental data access, easily configurable data masking profiles offer robust data protection.
Properly configuring Workday or adding new functionality is a crucial step towards success. When historic data needs to be uploaded into Workday and business processes configured, users may encounter sensitive information such as salary details, personal information, and company financials. At this point, organisations may prefer that super users working in the system do not have visibility of such data.
Smart Shield’s data masking enables elevated permissions on implementation tenants for performing configuration setups without accessing sensitive data. Smart Shield offers out-of-the-box profiles based on common scenarios and provides support for Workday Proxy, enabling testers to perform their tasks while only seeing data aligned with their masking rules. Profile-driven controls ensure the right people have the right access to the right data, at the right time enhancing data security and privacy within Workday.