banking Archives - Cyber Secure Forum | Forum Events Ltd
Posts Tagged :

banking

What are the FinTech innovations CISOs need to be aware of?

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
By:
0
0

The financial landscape is undergoing a transformation, driven by innovative FinTech startups. From artificial intelligence (AI)-driven personalization to the rise of super apps, these startups are at the fore front of revolution how we interact with money, the security measures around it.

Kiran Raj, Practice Head of Disruptive Tech at GlobalData, said: “As the banking world pivots from age-old methods to a digital-first paradigm, FinTech startups emerge as the pivotal game-changers. With the might of advanced technologies like AI, blockchain, and cybersecurity in their arsenal, they are forging a future of cost savings, enriched customer dialogues, and amplified profit avenues. In their quest to redefine finance, these startups are charting the course for our next chapter in economic interaction.”

Vaibhav Gundre, Project Manager of Disruptive Tech at GlobalData, added: “From ledger to lifestyle, startups are reimagining finance, crafting bespoke solutions, enhancing user engagement, and championing the customer-first mantra. In this dawn of hyper-personalized finance, from AI-driven advice to gamified money management, these innovators are not just rising to the occasion but elevating the entire game.”

GlobalData’s latest Startup Series report “Branches to bots: how startups reimagine FinTech” explores the potential of the emerging FinTech trends and various startups focused on these trends.

Super apps

Super apps are becoming the one-stop solutions for a range of financial services. They are reshaping the way we interact with digital services, bringing together diverse offerings within a unified ecosystem to redefine convenience and personalization.

US-based Brex enables businesses to control their spending management elements such as corporate cards, reimbursements, expense management, and bill payments from a single unified platform.

Gamification

FinTech startups are leveraging gamification to make finance fun, encouraging savings, investments, and financial literacy. Businesses are focusing on gamification to foster greater consumer loyalty and engagement with financial products and services.

Zywa, a middle eastern Gen Z-focused financial services startup, provides a gamified savings goal tracker and transaction rewards to increase engagement with its target customers.

Biometric authentication

Startups are strengthening security by integrating multi-modal techniques such as facial, voice, and iris scanning, in addition to behavioral analytics. They are utilizing technologies such as 3D facial recognition, deep learning algorithms, speech recognition, and liveness detection to ensure security.

TypingDNA, a US-based startup, provides AI-centered authentication and fraud detection solution that analyzes typing micro patterns to authenticate users.

AI-powered Personalization

Harnessing AI, FinTech startups offer tailored financial advice, personalized investment strategies, risk assessment, targeted marketing, and predictive spending insights. These innovations empower businesses to efficiently tailor their services to individuals on a large scale.

Credolab, an alternative risk analysis startup from Singapore, provides digital scorecards that are built on mobile devices and web behavioral metadata. It offers risk and fraud detection along with personalized personality-based marketing campaigns utilizing granular-level behavioral insights.

Gundre concluded: “As technology reshapes finance, FinTech stands at the forefront of innovation. Startup-driven transformations redefine norms, though regulatory and security considerations persist. Balancing innovation with stability remains paramount as the financial landscape evolves.”

Image by Brian Penny from Pixabay

Banking and investment sector IT spending to hit $652bn this year

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
By:
0
0

Worldwide banking and investment services IT spending is forecast to total $652.1 billion in 2023, an increase of 8.1% from 2022, with software experiencing the largest growth with an increase of 13.5%.

“Current economic headwinds have changed the context for technology investments in banking and investment services this year,” said Debbie Buckland, Director Analyst at Gartner. “Rather than cutting IT budgets, organizations are spending more on the types of technologies that generate significantly higher business outcomes. Spending on software, for example, is shifting away from building it in-house, in favor of buying solutions that generate value from investments more rapidly.”

According to the Gartner 2023 CIO and Technology Executive Survey, banking and investment services CIOs will spend the largest amount of new or additional funding in 2023 on cybersecurity, data and analytics, integration technologies and cloud.

More than half plan to increase investments in cloud, while reducing IT spending in their own data centers. This is reflected by slower growth in data center systems spending from 13.2% in 2022 to 5.7% in 2023 (see Table 1). Banks are disengaging from tangible assets and capital expenditure (capex) in favor of adopting services and operating expenditure (opex), to meet evolving customer and market expectations.

Table 1. Worldwide Banking and Investment Services IT Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

  2022 Spending 2022
Growth (%)		 2023 Spending 2023
Growth (%)
Data Center Systems 34,467 13.2 36,433 5.7
Devices 37,961 -9.9 37,149 -2.1
Internal Services 52,933 -2.2 55,156 4.2
IT Services 246,698 5.2 269,735 9.3
Software 153,268 11.2 174,014 13.5
Telecom Services 77,736 -2.9 79,599 2.4
Total 603,063 4.1 652,086 8.1

Source: Gartner (June 2023)

“To deal with the current economic climate, banking and investment services CIOs are now prioritizing more conservative objectives that support resilient and sustainable growth, such as a better customer experience (CX) and more efficient operations,” said Pete Redshaw, VP Analyst at Gartner. “This is a change from previous years when outright growth – new territories, new customers, new lines of business – was the primary objective of banking CEOs.”

Driven by the increased use of consulting services and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), IT services will be the largest spending category, forecast to reach almost $270 billion in 2023. This is an increase of 9.3% over 2022, reflecting the increasingly important role IT service providers play in helping banking and investment services organizations navigate emerging opportunities and challenges.

“Economic uncertainty is leading organizations to break down long-term contracts into multiple shorter projects,” said Buckland. “They’re also reluctant to sign new contracts, commit to long-term initiatives or take on new technology partners, which is driving an increase in the use of IT consulting services.”

With the global talent shortage impacting banking and investment services organizations, spending on internal services will increase by 4.2% in 2023 to support the increased costs of hiring and retaining talent.

“Even after the recent widespread redundancies at many of the technology giants, banks are no longer seen automatically by top talent as the most desirable, rewarding or stimulating destinations,” said Redshaw. “More innovative solutions are needed, such as dropping the requirement for university education and adding benefits such as lifetime retraining, hybrid teams, agile methods and fintech partnerships.”

Nuance trumpets $1bn fraud savings

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
By:
0
0

Nuance says it saved saved organisations more than $1 billion in total fraud costs in 2018 using AI-powered biometrics technology.

Fraud in enterprise contact centres has always been a challenge to manage, but with the explosion of digital channels, organisations today are faced with securing an increasingly complex ecosystem.

At the same time, fraudsters are getting more sophisticated, working through networks and social engineering their way into accounts to commit intricate, devastating crimes, using information they obtain through one attack to gain access to other accounts a given person may own.

Javelin Strategy & Research reports that account takeovers (ATOs) tripled over the past year, resulting in $5.1B in losses and a CFCA report found that the telco industry was hit with nearly $30B in fraud losses in 2018.  

Nuance Security Suite helps enterprises thwart omni-channel fraud through a layered offering of artificial intelligence technologies, including voice and behavioural biometrics, intelligent channel, geo and network detectors and ConversationPrintand DevicePrint algorithms.

Together, these technologies can identify legitimate customers through the sound of their voice, location, device and the way they talk, tap and type – flagging when a call or online interaction is likely fraudulent by analysing typical conversation patterns, voice characteristics and other aspects of an interaction, identifying perpetrators whose profiles do not match those of a given customer.  

“With Nuance voice biometrics, we get a clearer view of customer and fraudster behaviour, so we can keep genuine customers protected and take the fight to the criminals who are targeting their accounts,” said Jason Costain, Head of Fraud Strategy and Relationship Management, RBS Group. 

In less than one year, RBS screened 17 million inbound calls with Nuance Security Suite. Of these, 23,000 have led to alerts, and the bank has found that one in every 3,500 calls is a fraud attempt.

“The ROI from the tool is well over 300%, so as payback our technology deployment has been very impressive,” Costain added.    

As consumers are getting more comfortable with biometric identification and organisations look for innovative ways to authenticate, adoption of Nuance’s Security Suite is growing at a rapid rate.

Recent deployments include Lloyds Banking Group, Allied Irish Bank, Deutsche Telekom, Rakuten Life Insurance and RBS Group. In addition to curbing fraud, Nuance biometrics decreases the overall time agents spend resolving customer queries with one multinational financial services firm reducing agent handle time by 89 seconds after deploying the product.  

“Our customers come to us not only wanting to make their authentication process more convenient for customers but perhaps more importantly to evolve their contact centre security strategy. Our approach is unique in that our algorithms can not only identify and validate individuals by their voice, but also understand what types of conversation patterns fraudsters typically use. That’s powerful when you consider how much money is lost due to fraudulent account access each year, whether through traditional phone channels or in complex cross-channel attacks,” said Brett Beranek, General Manger, Security Business, Nuance Enterprise.