Financial Services
Together, data analytics and AI promise to transform both retail and corporate banking and insurance, delivering new customer experiences and more efficient employee workflows. As with healthcare, however, this is taking place against a background of tighter regulation and privacy concerns. Businesses want to use data to deliver more personalised and effective services, but in a way that makes risks easier to manage and actions easier to track.
Financial services institutions know the obstacles that stand between them and successful innovation. For one, they’re among the most commonly targeted organisations for intrusion, ransomware and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Globally, almost one in four cyberattacks target banks and financial institutions, rising to 28% in the UK during 2022.1 Account takeover attempts also focus on financial services and insurance, with roughly 40% made on financial websites.2 According to figures from the Ponemon Institute3, financial services was the second-most costly sector for data breaches in 2022, at an average $5.97m per breach.
Meanwhile, regulations are growing more stringent. Both the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK and the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council in the US have made it clear businesses need to go beyond business continuity planning and disaster recovery to focus on improving security and resilience. In December 2021, the Bank of Ireland was fined £245m for failing to have a robust continuity framework in place in the event of a significant IT disruption4. Line of business, compliance and IT teams are feeling the increased pressure of this shift.
While the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank has cooled down the heat surrounding innovative startups, established financial services and insurance institutions are still under more pressure to streamline, cut costs and grow more agile and competitive, with knock-on effects for staffing and for IT budgets.
In a recent blog5, Forrester analysts predicted that the banking, financial services and insurance sector – responsible for 24% of IT spend in the US and 15% in Europe – would reduce its spending during 2023. However, Gartner’s 2023 CIO Agenda Insights reports for both banking and investment6 and insurance7 showed that organisations were still increasing budgets for legacy application modernisation. Financial services see the need to modernise, even if budgets will be tight elsewhere.
Free up resourcesFinancial services IT resources are being stretched to their limits but one way to release the pressure is to outsource infrastructure, administration and support. With HP Adaptive Endpoint Management, the workloads and infrastructure involved in supporting endpoint devices is taken over by HP service experts, releasing in-house IT to focus on business-critical projects. HP Device as a Service goes even further, taking the work out of device provisioning and deployment, while ensuring that every worker gets the device that fits their needs.
Outsource securityManaged services can also reduce security and compliance workloads, while adding new layers of defence against emerging cyberattacks. HP Wolf Security delivers full-stack security from endpoints to the cloud, with integrated IT and security risk management and threat containment. With HP Adaptive Endpoint Management, HP service experts monitor security compliance on endpoint devices, and ensure appropriate device security policies are implemented and enforced. OS and BIOS updates can be rolled out at speed and scale – and without direct intervention from IT.
Be preparedBusiness disruption has become a key risk for FS&I organisations, including at the endpoint level. With HP Adaptive Endpoint Management and HP Proactive Insights, hardware and software issues can be discovered and remediated before they impact productivity. With Device as a Service, a faulty or lost device can be replaced within 24 hours, with the replacement personalised and fully productive within an hour of turning on.
Work securelyFS&I organisations should also consider adopting remote digital workspaces for teams dealing with critical applications or sensitive data. HP Anyware provides secure access to desktop environments, hosted on premise or in the cloud, to virtually any user device. All data remains within the hosted environment, with only encrypted pixels transmitted to
end users, yet those users get the same high frame rates and low latency they’d expect from a local PC.
The financial sector can be very difficult for managed services, because of the regulations and the security reviews the technology has to go through before it can be used. Our customers have been more than happy with what we offer on the security side.
This automated hedge fund trading software development company struggled to support a flexible hybrid work experience for an international development team, while meeting the stringent security requirements for protecting financial data and IP. Using HP Anyware, the company could support developers working anywhere in the world, connecting through to workstations colocated in secure data centres in the US and Europe.
1 Infosecurity Magazine, ‘Financial Services Targeted in 28% of UK Cyber-Attacks Last Year’, January 2023 https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/quarter-cyber-attacks-uk-financial/2 Allianz, ‘Key challenges facing the financial industry’, March 2022 https://www.agcs.allianz.com/news-and-insights/expert-risk-articles/financial-servicesrisks.html#:~:text=Cyber%20incidents%20(51%25%20of%20respondents,872)%20who%20participated%20in%20AGCS's3 IBM X-Force Exchange, ’Financial Services Industry Profile’, March 2023 https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/industry/guid:b09b5a592f9078cacbaee8a6b7a815604 Computer Weekly, ‘Bank of Ireland fined €24.5m for business continuity failures’, December 2021 https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252510425/Bank-of-Ireland-fined-245m-for-business-continuity-failures5 Forrester, ‘The Banking Crisis Will Send New Ripples Through Tech Budgets’, March 2023 https://www.forrester.com/blogs/banking-crisis-will-send-new-ripples-through-the-tech-industry/6 Gartner, ‘2023 CIO Agenda Insights for the Banking and Investment Industry’, https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/insights/cio-agenda/cio-agenda-banking-and-investment7 Gartner, ‘2022 CIO Agenda : An Insurance Perspective, https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/insights/cio-agenda/2022-cio-agenda-ebook-insurance
