The “Confidence Advantage”: Why Privacy, Cybersecurity and AI Governance Are Becoming Business Imperatives

In the latest episode of the Consumer Finance Monitor podcast that we are releasing today, we explore a topic that is becoming increasingly important for financial services companies and virtually every other business operating in today’s digital economy: how privacy, cybersecurity, and AI governance can be transformed from compliance obligations into sources of customer confidence, resilience, and competitive advantage.

Alan Kaplinsky (founder, founder lease for 25 years and now Senior counsel of our Consumer Financial Services Group) hosts and interviews our guests. Our guests are Amy Reeder Worley, managing director at BRG and author of a new book entitled The Confidence Advantage: Optimizing Privacy, Cybersecurity, and AI Governance for Growth, and Greg Szewczyk, chair of Ballard Spahr’s Privacy and Data Security Group. Amy advises senior executives and boards on cybersecurity, privacy, and AI risk, while Greg regularly counsels clients on privacy, cybersecurity, data governance, incident response, and the rapidly evolving legal issues surrounding AI.

Amy’s book is available on Amazon.

Key Topics Include:

·                 From “trust” to evidence-based confidence; A central concept in Amy’s book is the distinction between trust and confidence. She describes trust as a feeling, while confidence is an evidence-backed belief.

·                 Breaking down privacy, cybersecurity and AI silos; discussion about the need to move away from treating privacy, cybersecurity, and AI governance as separate disciplines operating in organizational silos.

·                 “Confidence by design”; Amy describes a framework she calls “confidence by design.”

·                 The danger of the “FOMO” approach to AI; what Amy describes as the “FOMO” approach to AI: moving as quickly as possible to deploy AI tools and planning to establish governance later.

·                 Where should companies begin?; For organizations that are just beginning to address these issues, Amy’s advice is surprisingly basic: start by determining what data the company has and where it is located.

·                 Boards need to know who owns the risk; discussion on the growing role of boards and senior management.

·                 Governance as a competitive advantage; Perhaps the most important message from the podcast is that good governance should not necessarily be viewed as a cost center.

·                 A rapidly changing legal landscape; the extraordinary uncertainty surrounding AI regulation.

We encourage our readers and listeners who are interested in these issues to listen to the full episode and to consider reading Amy’s book, The Confidence Advantage: Optimizing Privacy, Cybersecurity, and AI Governance for Growth. It provides a useful framework for thinking about an issue that is quickly moving from the privacy and technology departments into the boardroom.

Consumer Finance Monitor is hosted by Alan Kaplinsky, Senior Counsel at Ballard Spahr, and the founder and former chair of the firm's Consumer Financial Services Group. We encourage listeners to subscribe to the podcast on their preferred platform for weekly insights into developments in the consumer finance industry.