Syntrus | Achmea real estate & Finance – GDPR Compliance
Syntrus Achmea Real Estate & Finance is an investment management organization focused on real estate and mortgages for institutional investors. Syntrus Achmea manages more than €37 billion in invested capital for more than 70 clients.
Case studyThe challenge
Syntrus Achmea Real Estate & Finance (SARE&F) has an extensive digital archive that has grown over a period of 50 years. During this period, legislation and regulations have changed frequently which has implications for this archive. What was par for the course a few years ago – like the uncensored storage of a BSN number - is often no longer an option after the introduction of the GDPR. However, how do you remove BSN numbers from mortgage files when you are uncertain which documents contain them and finding out would require searching through 1.5 million documents – often with a deadline?
Our solution
Impact
Within a period of 6 weeks, 70,000 mortgage files, or 1.5 million documents, were scanned with the goal of finding a BSN number. With an accuracy of 95%, around 700,000 BSN numbers were successfully blurred out. This not only saved SARE&F a year in manual effort and associated costs, but it also provided SARE&F with a scalable model for ensuring the future compliance of legacy data.
6-week lead time
95% accuracy
12 months in time saved
Word from Syntrus | Achmea real estate & Finance
Martijn Groenewegen
Director of IT at Syntrus Achmea Real Estate & FinanceThe introduction of GDPR conflicts with our retention obligation, which means that we can no longer store sensitive information such as a BSN number in our archive. Removing these BSN numbers sounds simple until you become aware that our archive consists of large volumes of unstructured and uncategorized documents. Thanks to GDPR Compliance, we can scalably meet regulatory obligations in all cases and in conjunction at the same time.