Banking, Finance & Insurance IT Disposal

Why the bar is higher in financial services

Financial firms hold the data criminals most want: account details, identity documents, income and credit information, claims histories and payment card data. Regulated firms are also expected to have systems and controls that keep customer information secure, and the FCA has taken enforcement action over lost laptops and backup tapes in the past.

For disposal, that means the question is never "was it recycled?" It is "can you show, device by device, that the data was destroyed?" Our process is built to answer the second question.

Who we work with

The financial sector is much broader than the high-street banks. The organisations that ask us about disposal most often include:

• Building societies and credit unions closing or refitting branches
• Insurers, brokers and claims handlers with large contact centre estates
• Independent financial advisers and mortgage brokers
• Accountancy and payroll firms holding client financial records
• Lenders, collections agencies and payment processors

The equipment that matters

Alongside desktops and laptops, financial firms tend to have:

• Backup tapes and archive media, often outliving the system that wrote them by years. Tell us the quantity and format when you book.
• Branch and contact centre PCs retired in large batches
• Servers and storage arrays from data rooms and decommissioned systems
• Card payment terminals and PIN pads
• Phones and call recording hardware, which may hold recorded customer calls

Where cardholder data is involved, PCI DSS requires media to be destroyed when it is no longer needed. Treat anything that ever touched card data as in scope.

Supplier due diligence and outsourcing

If you treat IT disposal as an outsourced service, your own policies will probably require supplier due diligence. We make that straightforward: our Environment Agency carrier registration and ICO registration are on public registers, we can describe our process in writing, and you are welcome to visit our Sowerby Bridge facility before committing. We are working towards ISO 9001 and ISO 14001, with audits booked, and ISO 27001 is planned for a later stage. We will not claim any of them before the certificates are issued.

Branch closures and office consolidation

Branch closures and office consolidations release a lot of equipment at once, often from several sites on a tight timetable. Give us the full list of locations and dates and we will plan collections as one programme, with one set of documentation, rather than a series of separate jobs.