For financial services organizations, being competitive means more than offering good interest rates. Customers want simple, fast, and reliable digital experiences, from making payments to purchasing insurance. They also want to know their money and personal information are secure.
Digital transformation is an ongoing effort to provide the modern digital experiences customers want, as well as improve operations and reduce cost. However, 70% of mid-sized financial institutions said their current technology infrastructure is a barrier to innovation.1 These legacy systems are making it hard for organizations to offer the differentiating experiences they want—like virtual assistants, automated savings tools, and cardless ATM withdrawals.
Financial institutions are also a major target for cyber criminals, with organized crime responsible for 79% of breaches in the financial services industry.2 Cyberattacks on financial institutions are big business. In the first half of 2021, U.S. financial institutions paid $590M in ransomware attacks—more than in all of 2020.3
Whether your organization is looking to offer new digital experiences or better secure the ones you already provide, the right technologies can produce the desired outcome. Let’s examine three topics and the technologies that support them.
Safeguarding Data
Basic web application attacks are the most common method used in data breaches at financial institutions,4 meaning applications need greater security to prevent vulnerabilities from being exploited. Frequently, security is enabled when applications move to production, leading to false positives for the security team. Integrating security into the development lifecycle in the form of a SaaS-based or self-managed WAF can proactively protect against vulnerabilities, enabling more effective security without delaying releases.
Fraud is also a concern, as attackers use bots and automation to bypass security tools. Organizations struggle to balance security and ease-of-use, as anti-fraud technologies can be frustrating for customers. Artificial intelligence and machine learning can be used to identify and stop bots, even ones sophisticated enough to emulate human behavior. AI trained on verified human data allows it to identify fraud and share insights with fraud management teams.
Faster Innovation
In order to innovate quickly and bring new products to market, financial services organizations need a secure, scalable digital platform for applications that can provide the computational power for analytics and reporting. Cloud computing offers the speed and performance to innovate at scale, including managing containerized applications and multiple clouds.
Integrating app performance, security, and compliance directly into the DevOps automation pipeline can help bring new applications to market faster while minimizing developer downtime. Optimizing the digital transformation journey can reduce technical debt, improve visibility, and help the process run smoothly.
Open Banking
Customers deal with a number of financial institutions, and open banking streamlines sharing data between them. APIs allow networking between different accounts, but legacy core banking can’t always keep up, causing latency issues. For open banking to work well, organizations must reduce the response times for API calls and increase scale to handle millions or even billions of operations per day.
In addition, APIs are another connection that must be secured, making real-time API management a must to define and apply security policies. An API gateway can also supply authentication and traffic management to secure the connection.
Make Your Organization Competitive with F5 and Google Cloud
F5 solutions help you modernize applications, manage APIs, and secure sensitive data. With AI, machine learning, and real-time monitoring, you can prevent credential stuffing, account takeover attacks that lead to fraud, as well as denial-of-service attacks. F5’s WAF solutions can be integrated into your CI/CD pipeline to protect applications without delaying releases. API management enables open banking with performance and security, facilitating rapid innovation without compromising security or adding user friction.
Google Cloud is a flexible, secure cloud provider that embraces open source. It’s also incredibly multi-cloud friendly, providing pioneering capabilities around Kubernetes as well as big data and analytics. Google Cloud also prioritizes security; the platform’s strong security and cutting-edge encryption allow companies to safely store and analyze sensitive personally identifiable information. Open banking APIs, regulatory reporting, and high-performance analytics help you grow revenue while reducing risk.
Together, F5 and Google Cloud can help you offer new digital experiences at scale while protecting your customers through improved security, resilience, and performance in reducing costs and maintaining compliance.
Sources:
1 Cornerstone Advisors, What’s Going On In Banking 2022, February 2022
2 Verizon, Data Breach Investigations Report, May 2022
3 Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, Ransomware Trends in Bank Secrecy Act Data Between January 2021 and June 2021, October 2021
4 Verizon, Data Breach Investigations Report, May 2022
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