CUNA witness Kim Sponem will discuss the impact of data breaches on credit unions and members with a House Financial Services subcommittee Wednesday morning. Sponem, president/CEO of Summit CU, Madison, Wis., will testify on CUNA’s behalf at a financial institutions and consumer credit subcommittee hearing titled “Examining the Current Data Security and Breach Notification Regulatory Regime.”

“Kim is going to reinforce a lot of the messages that we have been delivering to Congress for the last several years about the impacts that merchant data breaches have on credit union members and on credit unions as financial institutions,” said CUNA Chief Advocacy Officer Ryan Donovan.

CUNA strongly supports both a strong national data standard for all entities that handle sensitive consumer information, and has made enhancing payments security a pillar of its 2018 advocacy agenda.

CUNA outlined key points of federal data breach legislation in a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee earlier this year.

The legislation must include:

• A flexible, scalable data protection standard;
   
• A notification regime requiring timely notice to impacted consumers, law enforcement and applicable regulators;
   
• Consistent, exclusive enforcement of the new national standard by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general; and
   
• Clear preemption of the existing patchwork of often conflicting and contradictory state laws.

Wednesday’s hearing is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. (ET) and will be streamed live on the committee’s website.