Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Peter Yared, the Founder & CEO of InCountry:
Q: This is the first time we have spoken. Can you provide a brief overview of InCountry?
A: Absolutely! Our first-of-its-kind product offering enables companies to adopt SaaS products with global data residency and compliance. Essentially, we help multinational companies scale in an increasingly complex regulatory landscape. InCountry is the first company to offer secure processing, retrieval, and storing services for personal, payment, finance, and health data. Today, our solutions are available in over 90 countries globally, spread across six continents.
Q: Can you put simply and tell us more about what specifically you do to help businesses with technology?
A: Over the past several years, we’ve seen a rapid increase in data policy implemented around the world and today, more than 130 countries have enacted regulations. Unlike regional laws that affect entire groups of countries, these laws are country-specific, meaning that they all have different requirements.
The European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one of the best known of these regulations, along with California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which went into effect earlier this year.
It’s becoming difficult for enterprises to keep up with these complex and disparate policies. Compliance is time-consuming and expensive and requires expert insight into regional obligations, an investment that’s not feasible for most companies. Non-compliance is also not an option. Failure to meet local guidelines can result in hefty fines, and in some cases, ejection from the region entirely.
As new regulations come into law and existing ones, such as the EU-US Privacy Shield are adjusted, enterprises need a solution that will enable them to scale globally while maintaining compliance. That’s where InCountry comes in. We provide a data residency platform that securely stores and processes sensitive data in its country of origin, ensuring data compliance for global companies.
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Q: Who is your client user and why?
A: Our solutions are typically used by financial services, healthcare companies, and other businesses in highly regulated industries. These industries often have more regulations to abide by and because of how easy our solution is to implement, it removes the burden away from internal teams, helping them to not only stay in business but grow globally.
Additionally, our solution is validated through successful SaaS partnerships with Salesforce, ServiceNow, Twilio, Mambu, Segment, amongst others. These partnerships enable our customers to remain compliant with internal and external policies.
We really have become a one-stop-shop for global data compliance.
Q: What are the key benefits of using InCountry?
A: Businesses that utilize InCountry experience several benefits. By eliminating compliance risk, we help companies scale their business, and can prevent them from getting fined millions of dollars. In 2018, for example, Uber was fined $148 million for violation of state data breach notification laws. Known as one of the biggest data-breach fines in history at the time, it’s just one example of how devastating non-compliance can be for companies.
Most recently, the July 2020 EU-US Privacy Shield decision has made the more than 5,300 companies that depended on the policy to transfer personal data across the Atlantic vulnerable to fines. The 4% of total revenue fine can and will be a make or break for a lot of companies.
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Q: What are the company’s plans and goals for the future?
A: This year has been challenging for several reasons but at InCountry, we’ve experienced a lot of development and growth. The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred digital transformation and accelerated the adoption of SaaS applications. With increased digitization, came increased data regulation. This year we saw a surge in business expansion into Europe and the Middle East, specifically from international enterprises. To help companies stay ahead of these regulations, we quickly launched a Middle East headquarters located in Abu Dhabi’s Hub71, the tech ecosystem based in Abu Dhabi Global Market Square. We also quickly
We expanded our solution to all countries in the EU and EEA, totaling over 90 countries and raised an additional $18M in funding from strategic investors that we plan to use to continue helping companies grow their business globally by meeting all current and future data regulatory requirements.
