cleverbridge is a provider of ecommerce and subscription billing solutions for monetizing digital goods, online services and SaaS. Through a flexible platform and unique consultative approach, organizations across the globe use cleverbridge to grow their digital businesses by building long-term customer relationships and maximizing global recurring revenue.

When approaching their GDPR strategy, maintaining consumer trust was just as important as demonstrating compliance to cleverbridge’s privacy team.

“The trust that privacy brings is becoming more and more important in today’s privacy landscape,” said Patrick Marshall, Compliance Manager at cleverbridge. “When it comes to managing risks, privacy is one of the critical issues; not only are there regulator and financial risks when dealing with personal data, but there are reputational risks.”

Centralizing the many pieces of the personal data puzzle

With both B2B and B2C companies relying on cleverbridge technology to convert more customers, reduce churn and scale globally, the company synchronizes data from CRM, ERP, web analytics and other sources. Collecting and processing personal data from these different sources, with many in diverse types of formats, presented the need for a solution to centralize the many pieces of the data puzzle.

“In addition to its ease of use, the OneTrust tool centralized our data and different file formats,” said Judith Eichel, Compliance Analyst at cleverbridge. “The tool truly allowed for seamless communication across teams and departments.”

OneTrust’s Assessment Automation was a key solution for the cleverbridge team. cleverbridge needed a tool that could complete the due diligence with the many service providers that they work with daily. “Now we have one platform that eliminates the back and forth between each provider. Incorporation has been much simpler all around,” said Eichel. “The compliance team was able to see the status and progress of assessments, allowing for a more streamlined approach.”

Embedding privacy into cleverbridge’s business model

cleverbridge has always had an emphasis on privacy, and their use of the OneTrust tool has only put more of a focus on privacy for the company and its stakeholders. “The OneTrust implementation was easily digestible,” said Marshall. “That was one of the main reasons we selected OneTrust, it was easy to use for everyone no matter their privacy background.”

With a more distributed compliance approach among departments, privacy is built in to each department of cleverbridge. “The business itself has taken a real strong interest in privacy regulations and standards; it’s now a key aspect of our business and our business model,” said Marshall.

Ongoing efforts for a well-rounded, global privacy program

While cleverbridge’s compliance team is still focused on ensuring GDPR compliance, their goal is to build a long-term and well-rounded overall privacy program. “It’s a priority to make sure we are incorporating all the new privacy laws and regulations that are being developed,” said Marshall. “We’re going to have a larger focus not just on the GDPR, but also incorporating risk management and third-party vendors that aren’t a part of the GDPR.”

With customer trust still top of mind for cleverbridge, they have found that their robust privacy program is an asset and a differentiator for them.

“In the past, privacy equaled a higher cost. The reality today is privacy is leading to greater reputational branding,” said Marshall. “More and more clients and prospects have asked about how we do privacy and how we prepared for the GDPR. They’re interested in our approach and are relieved when they see that we have dedicated resources and decades of experience in mitigating risk and maintaining global compliance.”