And employees want a seamless work experience without having to jump through security hoops every time they log in. Not only is the cost of maintenance high but the hit to productivity and innovation is real.
Yet, sensitive personally identifiable information — both customer and bank intellectual property — must be protected. The regulatory landscape has become stricter, and it’s becoming more costly to keep up. For example, the American Bankers Association has said3 a new anticorruption rule proposed by the U.S. Treasury will “be a major undertaking that will divert resources from other efforts.”
The regulatory landscape has also become more complex, given hybrid work. The IT and management overhead to support compliance has increased to ensure that the appropriate controls are in place for remote workers. In addition, there are multiple different layers of controls — for branch cashiers, traders, analysts, project managers, senior executives, call center representatives, and others. Managers must be careful; if controls are too strict, employees may seek workarounds or customers may get frustrated waiting while service personnel dig through the layers. Meanwhile, phishing, hacking, and malware incidents targeting financial institutions have increased. Denial-of-service attacks now account for 58% of incidents in the banking industry,4 almost twice the percentage in any other sector.
Also, security has become more complicated during hybrid work. An IDC report5 found that financial institutions face challenges in securing personal devices and home networks. It also revealed that especially in terms of remote access and hybrid workers, banks’ top challenge is trusting that employees will keep resources and information secure.
At the end of the day, compliance and cybersecurity measures must be invisible while effective.
“Employees should have a simplified experience,” Isaacs says. “It’s not their job to understand the parameters of security or access controls, and yet financial institutions cannot run the risk of their staff seeking workarounds to get their jobs done.”
Similarly, customers want assurances that their data is private and secure without having to do extra work to get that protection. Compliance and cybersecurity attributes must be designed into the employee and customer experiences.
No employee or customer should ever feel the drawbacks of legacy IT systems or manual processes. Like banking executives, they want speed and agility.
CIOs recognize the need to modernize legacy systems; it’s driving their IT investments and ranks among their top technology initiatives, according to the “State of the CIO Study 2022” from Foundry.6
It’s challenging to manage and support older applications and systems. IT teams have enough on their hands supporting today’s hybrid workforce; 50% of financial services institutions say IT support for remote workers is their top challenge, according to IDC.7
“IT management has become increasingly complex in the past few years, considering hybrid work, sophisticated cyberattacks, new regulations around data protection, and digital transformation efforts,” Isaacs says. “So financial institutions must keep all of these factors in mind as they drive their modernization agenda.”
Innovating the employee experience — and, by extension, the customer experience — doesn’t require a wholesale rip-and-replace effort. A managed digital experience enables banks to leverage what they have while modernizing existing systems at their own pace. That includes incorporating workflow automation, cognitive capabilities for proactive remediation, and analytics as well as taking a balanced approach to self-service functionality.
The ultimate goal is to deliver seamless, equitable employee experiences that benefit the bottom line — and that are measurable and aligned with business outcome objectives.
3 Compliance Week, February 9, 2022, https://www.complianceweek.com/regulatory-policy/banks-small-firms-wary-of-compliance-costs-of-fincen-beneficial-ownership-rule/31342.article 4 Verizon, “2022 Data Breach Investigations Report,” https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/dbir/ 5 IDC, “Global Future of Work Survey,” April 2022 6 Foundry, “State of the CIO Study 2022,” https://foundryco.com/tools-for-marketers/research-state-of-the-cio/ 7 IDC, “Global Future of Work Survey,” April 2022
