Securing digital innovations in financial institutions
“DIGITAL or Die” has become the motto for the financial services sector. Consumer expectations are pushing further and further into digital realms — and they have never been higher. This is reflected in research findings, such as a report from Bain & Co that estimated that Southeast Asia’s digital economy would reach US$200 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) in 2022, three years ahead of projections, fuelled by omni-channel ecommerce, digital adoption and flourishing financial services.
To meet these heightened demands, banks and financial services organisations are transforming the way they do business. They are digitising legacy platforms, accelerating cloud migrations and investing in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) to increase agility.
Indeed it is widely recognised that the use of digital technologies will help businesses streamline and improve processes. Since technology is an enabler to greater productivity, it will also result in higher standards of living and improved resilience against uncertainty. This will result in the explosion of digital technology spending in Asia Pacific by 3.5 times the value of the economy in 2023, according to a report by IDC.
Specific to the financial sector, cloud budgets continue to grow, with 92 per cent of Asia Pacific banks surveyed having planned to increase their cloud spending in 2022 compared with 89 per cent in 2020.
This unprecedented change also presents an opportunity for cyber attackers who look to turn these very innovations against the organisations embracing them. Ransomware actors, specifically, have become incredibly creative. They are finding and exploiting weaknesses using autonomous decision-making and self-learning capabilities, deploying sophisticated tooling and hands-on-keyboard actions to disable endpoint defences and targeting data-rich providers upstream, among many evolving methods.
Identity security as a financial business accelerator
In this ever-expanding threat landscape, identity is the strongest security control that every organisation must get right. Yet 79 per cent of senior security leaders across industries admit that cybersecurity has taken a back seat to digital transformation initiatives, driving up cybersecurity debt and potentially hamstringing future innovation and growth.
Security should be a business accelerator instead of a barrier for organisations. However, when it comes to digital transformation, many organisations stalled because they do not have the ability to authenticate in the cloud or manage user access or entitlements or policy in the cloud. The organisations “doing digital transformation right” are those that can figure out how to use identity to enable, and even automate, the transformation upfront.
Organisations need to strengthen their cyber resilience as they drive transformation initiatives forward. Solutions that can help to secure identities are key in helping organisations to deliver measurable cyber risk reduction, helping them meet compliance requirements, and contributing to millions in audit and change management-related cost savings over time. Without a proper way to manage privileged access across an IT environment, cyber risk grows and compliance suffers. As a result, organisations may not be able to meet their regulatory requirements.
There are many challenges to securing banks and financial organisations as new technologies such as blockchain and Web 3.0 come to the fore. Fortunately, there are ways to create a frictionless experience that is highly secure. The ability of financial services organisations to secure access for all identities across the enterprise and within customer applications so they can meet consumer expectations and defend against attacks is crucial for their competitiveness and success in the long term.
The writer is head of Asean at CyberArk
