Financial services organisations are often in possession of extremely sensitive and valuable data. This data makes such organisations an extremely desirable target for cybercriminals. As a result, adaptive authentication is a necessity to protect important assets.
Current Security Challenges Within The Financial Services
Cyber-attacks and bad actors often target financial service enterprises for obvious reasons.
More than 6.1 billion people are expected to be using digital payments globally by 2023. This steady growth in digital payments has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as many businesses opted to become card-only.
This move, however, puts sensitive payment information into the hands of banks and credit card companies. When combined with a growing global population and an increasing demand for financial products on digital platforms, the vulnerability of financial transactions will continue to grow. Daily digital transactions are now exposed to more threats than ever before.
Whilst cyber-attacks target all industries, financial services are disproportionally impacted. The financial services industry alone has contributed 62% of all exposed data in 2019.
The financial services industry has the second-highest cost per breached record, at an average of $210 per breached record, with only healthcare having a higher average
A data breach is damaging brand reputation and causes compliance issues. As a result, companies must protect themselves from bad actors.
The Need For Strong Authentication
In an effort to protect themselves, many organisations introduced two-factor authentication (2FA) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to secure access for both their workforce and clients. However, simple passwords and 2FA are no longer enough to protect enterprise infrastructure.
OTP via SMS/Email
Phone fraud is on the rise
Hard Tokens
High Cost, Poor UX; compromised in the past
Knowledge Based Answers
Easily phished or found on social media
Push-to-Accept (P2A)
User conditioned to accept when not authenticating
Passwords are easily compromised, with 61% of people reusing their passwords across multiple websites. Whilst 2FA is undoubtedly a step in the right direction towards better identity and access management, and a vast improvement over password-only authentication, 2FA still has limitations.
2FA used to be a secure authentication method, but modern financial institutions require more advanced solutions to protect themselves from cyber-attacks that are only growing in sophistication. To address the shortcomings of 2FA, adaptive authentication has become the new standard.
Adaptive authentication adds an additional layer of security to single sign-on (SSO) and 2FA. It does this based on analysing factual contextual information related to the user requesting access to resources. Adaptive authentication is a method for implementing or selecting the appropriate factors depending on a user’s risk profile and tendencies. These risk-checks occur in the background and are ‘invisible’ to the user, enabling improved security and good user experience.
Adaptive Authentication for the Workforce
Employees, partners, and contractors are prone to human error and can be the weakest link in a security programme. Attackers will utilise phishing attacks and poor password management to prey on individuals. Once inside an organisation, bad actors move laterally, escalating user privileges to gain access to systems and data.
Number of Data Breaches per Method in Banking
Unauthorised access occurs when bad actors gain access to an environment via various forms of hacking. These represent the largest form of data breaches within the industry. Bad actors will take advantage of weak security solutions to infiltrate enterprise environments.
Many financial institutions have a vast range of identities, data stores, deployment models, geographical locations, applications, and devices. By deploying an IAM solution, such organisations can be assured that they have a solution that meets their security requirements. Additionally, the right IAM solution supports a digital transformation journey, as it can accelerate the adoption of new technology, and reduce operating costs by decreasing helpdesk burden. Depending on security requirements, business objectives, user experience, and current infrastructure ecosystem, financial organisations can assess and determine an IAM solution best suited for their requirements – be it on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid approach.
Adaptive Authentication for Customers
It’s not just employees that can benefit from IAM solutions. Financial institutions manage customer identities, and whilst these identities don’t need access to an entire network, they still need access to personal accounts and data. Customer activities can increase the level of a company’s vulnerability – financial institutions must ensure that they are granting access to the right client.
Biometric Authentication
Symbol-To-Accept
Providing customers with secure choices to access their personal data is critical for providing positive user experience. Delivering biometric MFA, adaptive authentication, and self-service can give customers a sense of control and protection and ensures business security. A purpose-built IAM solution will focus on securing the user’s identity to enable engaging customer experiences that are consistent and secure across all channels and applications.
The SecureAuth Identity Platform
- Multi-factor authentication methods – provides options and choices for users while security professionals meet more use cases to eliminate security concerns
- Adaptive authentication risk checks – protects organisations while preserving experience with behind the scenes risk analysis that won’t burden users
- Infinite authentication workflows – highly flexible workflows enable the creation of authentication experiences that meet the security and usability needs of every workforce identity
- User self-service options – self-service features for password resets, account unlocks, device enrolment and profile updates mean users stay productive and helpdesk calls are reduced, delivering an immediate return on investment
- Deployment freedom – SecureAuth’s platform can be delivered hybrid, on-premise, or cloud
- Simple administration – globally managed configurations and policies combine with an extensive application template library to enable the rapid creation and easy management of authentication experiences
- Intelligent Identity Cloud – cloud-based analytics and administration that employs a big-data approach to delivering identity intelligence that informs adaptive authentication to ensure strong security and maximum usability for all identities.
How Can We Help?
Over the past decade, IAM has transitioned from an IT-centric administration and compliance tool to a critical security component in the modern digital enterprise. Protecting the business and supporting a rapidly expanding definition of users, a modern IAM solution must secure valuable resources, support multiple use cases, be easy to use for both administrators and users, provide intelligence, and manage the authentication of multiple user types – the workforce, contractors, partners, and customers. To find out how Mobliciti can implement an IAM solution that is tailored to your organisation, get in touch.
