Account Based Intelligence vendor LeadGnome completed the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield certification process with the U.S. Department of Commerce. The new process ensures that privacy is protected when personal data is transferred from the EU to the US. The Privacy Shield process was implemented last summer after the previous Safe Harbour regime was invalidated by the European Court of Justice.
LeadGnome’s email reply service mines emails for intelligence such as left the company, out of office, change of position, change of name/email, and unsubscribe requests. “LeadGnome is unique in its ability to mine the unstructured body of reply emails for account based intelligence. It was, therefore, important to acquire EU-U.S. Privacy Shield certification to assure our customers of our commitment to the privacy of their data,” said Matt Benati, CEO of LeadGnome.
Because the firm collects emails, titles, and business phones, they did not have to go through the more stringent approval level for firms that store credit, payment, or personal data. This helped expedite the approval process with the Department of Commerce. As LeadGnome was already Safe Harbour compliant, the approval process was focused on conforming to changes between the Safe Harbour and Privacy Shield. LeadGnome worked with the Better Business Bureau as a compliance partner and completed the process in about two months. Benati believes the process will speed up as the certification backlog clears, but noted that his firm benefited from having Safe Harbour certification.
The LeadGnome platform is integrated with major CRMs and MAPs including Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo and Oracle Cloud.
“LeadGnome is committed to data privacy and business transparency. We had already employed many of the required best practices, so the certification process was completed significantly ahead of schedule,” said Benati.
Other vendors that are Privacy Shield compliant include Dun & Bradstreet, Avention, Zoominfo, Infogroup, Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, SalesLoft, ReachForce, and Outreach. The US International Trade Administration publishes a list of Privacy Shield compliant firms.