Today we are joined by Thomas Wilczek, the Project Manager for SMOOTH at FundingBox, one of the SMOOTH project partners, and an expert in funding opportunities provided by European and international institutions for small business and start-ups in Europe.
Thomas has agreed to join us today to let us know his insights about how SMOOTH can really help small companies in Europe thrive by being fully complaint with GDPR and what opportunities they can seize from the project to make their business more efficient and productive.
Hi Thomas thank you for joining us. Let’s start with the most common doubt for entrepreneurs – why is GDPR good for business?
The General Data Protection Regulation is good for business because it helps create trust with consumers (I rather use a service that respects and manages my data privacy correctly and consciously) and it helps businesses to optimize their data flow and management, making it more efficient, having data sets of higher quality (direct from the consumer), which should result in more direct control as well as in more cost-effective operations (marketing for example). And that is all besides avoiding possible fines, legal trouble, and the resulting bad press.
Ok great, so small businesses really can get something out of it. Speaking of opportunities, what is SMOOTH and how does it help businesses to be compliant with GDPR?
SMOOTH is an EU-funded project that aims to help micro-enterprises to become aware of and be compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It does so by developing and implementing an easy-to-use and affordable tool in the form of a cloud-based platform and provide simple and clear information via an interactive handbook and app, as well as an active online community. The goal is for micro-enterprises to be able to easily assess their legal obligations and analyse their level of compliance with the new data protection regulation in a “smooth”, secure and affordable way.
The cloud-based platform will help them validate the GDPR compliance of their privacy policies, databases and their tracking elements in websites and mobile applications. Micro companies will be informed via a compliance report of the elements needed to be GDPR compliant and will be directed towards resources that can help them solve any detected issues.
What are the benefits of being a beta-tester for SMOOTH?
Apart of helping the SMOOTH project immensely in fine-tuning and finishing the development of this important tool and initiative, becoming a beta-tester will allow you to assess your current GDPR compliance for free via a compliance report that you will receive shortly after having participated in the pilot.
Furthermore, you will be eligible for different kind of perks depending on the test modality you chose: from gift vouchers to a 1-year free subscription of SMOOTH once the platform is officially launched (the equivalent of 6 reports, which for example is surely interesting for fast-paced bootstrapping startups that had to pivot and need to adapt their data management quickly).
Another benefit is definitely becoming part of the SMOOTH online community, where you can stay up to date about GDPR, network, and exchange information with your peers. Having said that, you can join the community at any time here:
https://spaces.fundingbox.com/c/smooth
