Finance Authentication Solution
Financial services companies such as banks, wealth management firms, and insurance companies look to simplify application access for their fleets of finance professionals and customer care personnel while protecting their data and meeting compliance requirements in the easiest way possible. From providing fast access to key applications like HR and CRM, granting access to new employees to the firm’s resources, to having an instant “kill switch” to remove access from departed employees, you want to manage it all efficiently, without increased IT costs.
The financial services sector is evolving rapidly: increasing and changing customer expectations, a radical shift towards digital channels (mobile), a tsunami of new regulations (PSD2, GDPR, MiFID2, Dodd-Frank act…), new technological evolutions (e.g. IoT), increased competition of FinTech players…
These rapid evolutions force banks to deliver quickly new innovative and compelling financial services, with an excellent and frictionless user experience. At the same time the financial services sector should be careful not to jeopardize the trust of its customers. This means customers should be confident that their transactions will be correctly executed and that their financial information is safe with their bank. Security is essential in this story, but ensuring security is easier said than done, given that the financial services sector is the biggest target of cybercriminals in recent years (in the UK payment and financial services account for about 75% of the cyber-attacks).
Malware, phishing, social engineering and fraud attacks are increasing year after year, new mobile technology attack methods such mobile spoofing and cloning are being used more and more and every day a security breach occurs in the financial services sector. Such breaches do not only result in financial loss, but damage considerably the customers and the bank, as financial data is some of the most sensitive information stored on the Internet. Today the yearly cost for online identity fraud is estimated to be more than a trillion dollars.
The first step in ensuring security is authentication, i.e. verifying that someone is who he says he is (and not someone who has stolen that identity). For the financial services industry, having a secure but user-friendly authentication process is no longer a nice-to-have, but a necessity.
The current authentication methods, which are typically based on passwords, meet however neither of these objectives, i.e. passwords give a poor user experience and are not at all secure.
Banks are traditionally investing heavily in authentication solutions. With a spending of over $1 billion a year (representing approximately 30 percent of the total security budget of banks), banks are the leading investors in these technologies.
In this blog, I hope to demonstrate however that these investments are likely to increase even more in the coming years, as banks will struggle to provide authentication methods, which are both secure and frictionless.
Securing financial services is however more than just authentication. Typically, we can identify 4 steps in providing access to a service for a person:
