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Australian Security Magazine: Cognizant’s Banking and Financial Services Experts Say Combining Data Management With Advanced Analytics can Help Prevent Financial Cybercrime

“Cybercrime is a serious threat to anyone and everyone online. However, in the digitally connected world with online transactions far outnumbering those in hard cash, the threat couldn’t be higher for financial services and banking firms,” write Cognizant’s Carlo Lacota, Assistant Vice President, Banking and Financial Services, and Dushyant Kapoor, Director of Consulting, Banking and Financial Services. Excerpts:

“Devising the right privacy and protection policies for the goldmine of customer data is critical for the banks to, on the one hand, deter potential hackers from getting unauthorised access to that data and, on the other hand, allow customers to transact effortlessly whilst allowing internal staff appropriate access to that data in order for them to provide customised experiences and relevant offers to the customers.

The first step in implementing adequate controls is to understand the risks and their business impact. Banks need to invest time in properly assessing the risks they might have to confront.

By mapping these risks against internal policies, procedures and controls, banks can assess their effectiveness in mitigating risks and fine-tune them accordingly.

Ownership of data within a bank or a financial services organisation is critical to clarify responsibilities for implementing controls and assessing their effectiveness on an ongoing basis.

Ongoing risk assessment and mitigation needs to be undertaken proactively by the banks to effectively prepare for situations when risks eventuate.

Proactive security is not just about securing systems and reacting to attacks, but also about anticipating future attacks at every step of the way.

The key objective of organisations should be to build a resilient system that can be restored and brought back online quickly in the event of a security breach.

Combining data management with advanced analytics can be effective in detecting and preventing growing threats. By collecting and analysing massive volumes of current and historic data within the organisation, as well as from external agencies providing financial crime data, banks can gain a comprehensive view of customers and transactions, as well as insights into hitherto unnoticed relationships between various entities.

Forensic data analytics can help banks identify and predict risk patterns and issues in advance, enabling them to pre-empt criminal activity, particularly insider threats and data breaches that involve gaining unauthorised access to sensitive data.

The key to integrating multiple risk strategies lie in the banks’ ability to get high-quality and consistent data from across the organisation.

If banks and financial services organisations want to have an efficient and proactive information security strategy, it is key that they work towards standardising the large volumes of customer, transaction, crime and other unstructured and semi-structured data they own. By using best-in-class architecture and investing in the right data analytics platforms, organisations can significantly improve the overall data quality and accuracy needed to support real-time monitoring and data-driven decision-making.”

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