Fifty-two thousand.
That’s how many documents filled with data a large mortgage lending company that Melissa Unsell-Smith was working with had to go through in order to manually blackout all names and identities.
Twenty-six hundred.
Before using Rectify Data, Unsell-Smith’s new company, the same mortgage lender spent 2,600 working days and $520,000 in order to manually perform the task of eliminating names and identities for these documents.
Ninety-three percent.
That same mortgage lender used Unsell-Smith’s new company, Rectify and shaved the amount of time it took to go through and make private names and identities on those same documents by 93 percent, driving down labor costs from $10 to $1 in the process.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Unsell-Smith and her co-founder and CEO, Lisa McComb, have achieved early success with their new venture Rectify, a recently launched platform that automates data protection for companies. The two have spent the better part of the last two decades focusing on legal and data protection efforts as it relates to Fortune 10 companies. Their previous company eLumicor, based in San Antonio, had a major focus on litigation discovery scenarios.
What’s different about Rectify, Unsell-Smith said, is that the focus is not on cybersecurity and governance information but on data protection and data privacy.
“We look at organizations where an event triggers a need for that company to share data outside the company,” she said. “Where we come in is where federal and state regulations need to be protected.”
The biggest problems that Unsell-Smith saw when working in the industry were governments and various private companies struggling with their data when it came to open records requests. She would find large enterprise organizations that had manual processes when it came to data privacy literally have to use a black marker, or draw text boxes with a mouse, in order to blackout data.
Some events where Rectify might be needed are pharmacy companies that need aggregate data as opposed to specific patient data, or in M&A where a company is getting data from the company they are acquiring. Additionally, Unsell-Smith cited public health data as something Rectify might be working with as well.
“It’s often shared in the aggregate, and has to be protected,” she said. “You have to protect trade secrets and identities.”
Rectify currently has a patent pending on its workflow methodologies that Unsell-Smith and her co-founder Lisa McComb had been developing for some time. These workflow methodologies come in over 120 languages.
While Rectify opted for a low-key launch, the software had been in production since January. The company performed a variety of use case scenarios, and currently have a few clients in a proof of concept phase, including a Fortune 500 company.
Rectify’s software can be deployed in two ways: As a software as a service in the cloud, as well as an on premise solution that they deploy for clients who have small data sets they are trying to protect. Their model has a per-gigabit fee, as well as a fee for the data they are protecting. However, Unsell-Smith says the price depends on the difficulty of items being removed. Removing Social Security numbers from a data set, for example, is easier to execute and might be less expensive than, say, creating a set of consumer identity profiles.
For Unsell-Smith, she hopes Rectify can help customers fully understand how their data is shared and where privacy is involved.
“Data is created at an exponential pace,” she said. “(Lisa) and I see a place where data sharing is commonplace to increase society knowledge.”
But she said, in order to freely share data, privacy and protection have to be at the forefront of any operation.
