Cybersecurity considerations 2024: Financial services sector

As featured on BusinessMirror:   Cybersecurity considerations 2024: Financial services sector

In today's rapidly evolving landscape, financial services organizations are facing unprecedented challenges amidst a backdrop of geopolitical tensions, regulatory shifts and emerging technologies like generative AI and embedded finance. As the global economy gains momentum, it's crucial for financial services leaders to explore innovative avenues for value creation while managing cybersecurity risks and privacy concerns.

This article explores cybersecurity considerations in the financial services sector and provides a roadmap for navigating these challenges successfully and responsibly in an evolving threat and regulatory landscape. 

As the FS sector continues to scale technology innovations, regulators are responding with new cybersecurity standards to balance growth with governance. The daunting task for today’s security professionals is to calibrate their regulatory reporting for an increasingly borderless world while maintaining security controls that can be tailored to local requirements.

A central consideration for the FS sector is how to most effectively navigate the current business landscape to ensure resilience and business continuity. While multinational companies often lead the way in adopting emerging trends, smaller firms may often be less prepared to tackle these complexities. Through partnerships, firms can benefit from shared knowledge and enhance their security posture in response to evolving global regulatory demands without having to reinvent the wheel.

Digital agendas are proliferating at a massive rate. With the increasing shift to cloud-based systems and remote work, the volume of data that needs protection is skyrocketing. As a result, the cyberattack surface is expanding, creating more alerts and triage events for FS cybersecurity leaders to manage. So, how can security teams keep detecting threat after threat and identify what to prioritize? One of the most efficient ways to do that is through automation.

As operating models digitize, SOCs should automate and upgrade their processes to keep pace. With security automation, FS institutions can secure the third-party ecosystem, assess vulnerabilities, and expose weak links within vendor and supplier ecosystems. Using AI and ML, the sector can centralize critical security processes for high-risk areas, enabling security teams to pursue more agile and efficient response times.

Today, the line between business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) security has blurred considerably. Driven by intersecting business models, it’s vital that FS organizations now view identity not in isolation but from a holistic perspective. That's an important driver toward an identity and access management (IAM) model that encompasses a new level of resilience suitable for federated, private, public, or multi-cloud computing environments.

While the FS sector actively embraces advanced cybersecurity and IM measures, there is a pressing need to accelerate the adoption and preparedness level to keep pace with change. Evolving to a model where a digital identity with a high level of assurance is a reality will enable businesses to collect, store and process less personally identifiable information, which would be a decidedly positive outcome for consumers.

In addition to assessing your cybersecurity program and helping you to ensure it aligns with your business priorities, KPMG professionals can assist financial services organizations develop advanced digital solutions, advise on the implementation and monitoring of ongoing risks and advise on the design of appropriate response to cyber incidents.

KPMG professionals are adept at applying leading thinking to financial services firms’ most pressing cybersecurity needs and developing custom strategies that are fit for purpose. KPMG professionals offer a broad array of technology solutions including cyber cloud assessments, privacy automation, third-party security optimization, AI security, managed detection and response.