GDPR and financial advice: Special categories of personal data

Given the nature of the service provided by financial advice firms to their clients, and the strict regulatory framework within which they operate, it is important businesses record and process sensitive categories of data on their clients in order to provide the best possible service to each client and be in a position to explain exactly why they have offered the advice that they have. Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), sensitive data is referred to as being special category data. This is defined in Article 9 of the regulation - ‘Processing of special categories of per...