BFC Bulletins Monthly News Digest
When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit, financial institutions rushed to digitize both their internal processes and their consumer-facing services in order to provide consumers with reliable products and services in a new and uncharted reality. However, in their haste to digitize, many financial institutions may have unknowingly created security holes and vulnerabilities that fraudsters have rushed in to take advantage of. Here are the top five things financial institutions need to do right now to secure their new and existing digital offerings:
- Become a digital-first organization – many financial institutions have made great progress is digitizing; however, they should look to also digitize remaining processes to reduce operational costs, enhance their agility and speed of innovation, give them a better ability to scale and provide consumers with better overall service.
- Reinvent the consumer journey – the consumer experience is everything, especially in the modern world and even more especially when it comes to doing business digitally. Financial institutions should look to streamline and strengthen their processes in order to provide consumers with a frictionless yet secure experience.
- Reevaluate their risk stance – reevaluating an organization’s stance on risk, fraud and what level of risk is acceptable under different scenarios is important. This should be followed by a hard look at security measures across channels and the implementation of a multi-layered approach to security in order to reduce risk.
- Ensure mobile banking apps are secure – there are entirely different security concerns and risks when it comes to mobile banking apps as compared to online applications. Financial institutions should adopt technologies like mobile application shielding with run-time protection to ensure that their apps are secure, even when used on an insecure device.
- Leverage new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and real-time risk analytics – by leveraging newer technologies powered by AI and machine learning, financial institutions can gain real-time risk analytics capabilities that provide visibility across all their online and mobile channels in order to stop fraud attempts and other security attacks as they happen.
