Canopy is an anonymous platform and we strongly recommend to remove personally identifiable information from your bank statements even though Canopy does not read or store any personal data in its database.
What information should be anonymized?
In general, any personal information should be removed from your statement. We recommend to amend the following:
- Name, address and any other personal information. This information is normally on the first page of your statement.
- Payment beneficiary details found in your transactions. You may wish to omit the names/account number in these cases.
- Please do not remove the bank name/branch and account number - we use this to identify your account. You may change the account number to a different value, but please ensure the replaced value is consistent every month. For example, 112345-1 is consistently replaced with abc345-1 every month.
How can I anonymize the information?
You have three options for anonymization:
- Anonymize with Canopy PDF Anonymizer
Customers can use Canopy’s inbuilt custom PDF anonymizer tool placed in the pre-upload stage, before data going to the Canopy database. With this tool, customers will be able to anonymize (text replace) their PDF statements on the fly, and upon verification of the post-anonymized PDF statements, upload them into Canopy. Canopy does not store the original PDF statement.
URL: https://pdf-anonymizer.canopy.cloud/
2. Anonymize with a third-party software
We have evaluated many PDF editors in order to recommend you the most suitable ones. According to the experiences of our customers, a few PDF editor tools have proved to be very useful.
Depending on your operation system, we recommend the following tools:
- Windows: We recommend PDFdu Text Replace for any text replacements. Additionally, PDF Eraser has proved to be very helpful whenever text passages, e.g. transaction narrations, need to be removed.
- Mac: Unfortunately, there are very few suitable offline tools for Mac unless you are willing to spend at least USD 100 on an advanced PDF editor. Alternatively, you may use the PDFdu online tool. However, we would like to point out that by using online tools Canopy cannot guarantee security of your data.
| PDFdu PDF Text Replace | PDF Eraser | A-PDF Text Replace | PDFdu Online | Infix PDF Editor | Acrobat Adobe DC | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Supports Mac |  | | | |||
| Supports Windows | | | | | | |
| Stores replacement settings | | | ||||
Processes multiple replacements simultaneously | | | | | ||
| Offline tool available | | | | | | |
| Price | USD 7 | USD 29.95 | USD 35 | Free | USD 99 | SGD 20 / mth |
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| Link | Link | Link | Link | Link | Link |
Instructions
Please download the guide on how to use each of the tool here:
3. Upload statements without anonymizing
In the third option, customers can still upload original PDF statements as Canopy’s data extraction process makes best effort to not read nor store PII from the statements into its database. Canopy will receive the original PDF statements in a designated secure area outside of the database, and will discard them upon a short holding period after data extraction is complete.
Anonymous Email Address
We take our clients' privacy very seriously. All clients, especially individuals, are encouraged to communicate with us through an anonymous email. We kindly ask you to create an anonymous email address (gmail or the like) with a username which does not personally identify you (e.g. does not include your personal name or company name). For eg. apollo128@gmail.com
Anonymous User Name
A Username (Account Name) should ideally contain alphanumeric characters with minimum 6 characters.
The Username can be the same name in your email address. For eg. apollo128
Usernames containing the words Canopy, Demo, Test, Trial and Pilot cannot be claimed.
Usernames cannot be changed once they are created.