Securing Financial Services
8th July 2020, Online
Protecting the customer, securing critical global infrastructure
Security, privacy and financial crime priorities for wholesale and retail financial institutions
On March 3, Andrea Enria, chair of the ECB supervisory board, sent a letter 'To all Significant Institutions' to raise their awareness of contingency preparedness in the context of COVID-19.
The purpose of the letter was to remind institutions of 'the critical need to consider and address potential pandemic risk in their contingency strategies', and it identified a series of IT and cybersecurity challenges including:
- the need for key third-party suppliers to maintain critical processes
- the need for alternative and sufficient back-up sites
- large-scale remote working and other flexible working arrangements
- a potential increase in cyber-attacks and cybersecurity-related fraud, aimed both at customers and institutions via phishing emails
- the risks inherent in customers' higher reliance on remote banking services
As the crisis has unfolded, all of these challenges have been realised and more besides.
Online and mobile channels have seen huge increases in volumes; communications channels have been overwhelmed; trading floors have been swept by the coronavirus pushing market-critical functionality out of the bank and into the home; widespread remote working brings all the obvious security challenges and introduces new ones - messaging and document-sharing apps have seen volumes quadruple as they've moved out of the trading room, throughout the bank, and into the supply chain; and legacy systems, already creaking in the era of digital transformation, are proving even more of a headache.
The financial sector may have been given a headstart by the regulatory push, and it is certainly one of the leaders in terms of investment in technology and cybersecurity, but these challenges are unprecedented in terms of scale and the speed with which the situation is changing.
And what about the smaller banks? What about the fragmented insurance and asset management sectors that have been much slower to digitalise? What about the smaller fintechs upon whom the big banks have begun to rely - and not just because of PSD2 and Open Banking? And finally, what about the underlying payments infrastructure and platforms that have already proved vulnerable?
The 1st Securing Financial Services Summit will look at how cybersecurity teams are tackling this dramatically different threatscape. Join us for real-life case studies and in-depth technical sessions from the security and privacy teams behind some of the world's most admired brands.