There’s never been a more important time to focus on building resilience in banking. The COVID-19 pandemic, global supply chain disruptions, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, recent interest rate rises and inflationary pressures. All perfectly illustrate the need to prepare for unexpected and expected risks and events.
So how do banks plan for the ‘as yet unknown’ and what role can AI-powered technologies play?
Resilience in the banking industry is, of course, a wide and deep conversation. On the financial side, having the appropriate procedures in place to address issues of credit, market and liquidity risk are key. Stress testing is common and all indications would suggest it’s working, take for example, recent results in the UK.
While overall business resilience is key for all types of industries and organizations—as it enables them to absorb stress and adapt to rapidly changing market conditions—some types of resilience have become priorities.
According to a recent Dataminr-commissioned Economist Impact survey of senior business leaders, three types of resilience are key: organizational, technological and operational.
Download report: Building Business Value: Resilience in a rapidly evolving global environment
As today’s ever-evolving and complex risk landscape continues to exert more pressure on these key areas of resilience, it’s critical for banks to take action.
Uncover the unexpected
Crises and high-impact events that can impact banking operations often unfold unexpectedly and leave little time for preparation. This is the case whether it’s a cyber attack on a Danish Central Bank, the aforementioned war in Ukraine that ultimately drove many large U.S. banks out of Russia, or even chip shortages constricting the supply of customer payment cards.
Even in cases where advance warning is available, critical incidents rarely evolve the way people expect. It’s critical therefore to be able to adapt fast as these events develop. As banks continue to face myriad challenges that threaten their resilience, it’s hardly surprising that they are looking to increase their threat intelligence gathering capabilities.
Swift deployment pays dividends
Boosting response capability is easier said than done. Banks need to consider whether they have the right processes in place to be able to handle more intelligence. Can that intelligence be appropriately operationalized? Also, do they have the teams and budgets available to integrate new solutions into existing systems at speed?
The latter point is critical. FS-ISAC reports that ransomware attacks on banks are continually growing in sophistication and volume. At the same time, economic and geopolitical uncertainty has reached levels unseen for a decade. Banks can’t afford to wait months to deploy new threat intelligence tools when the next major disruption could happen at any moment. They need tools capable of supporting resilience efforts right now to identify potential risks in order to react accordingly and in a timely manner.
Sophisticated not complicated
There are tools on the market that can help security and risk teams address these requirements. AI-powered, real-time alerting solutions like Dataminr Pulse for Corporate Security can provide real-time intelligence and alerting to support resilience efforts, without adding integration or management complexity to an already extensive ecosystem of security vendors and products.
But there’s more to it than real-time alerting. Pulse for Corporate Security also offers geovisualization and risk management capabilities to help users operationalize and act on the real-time information received.
Geovisualization gives security teams access to rich visual data to determine where risks are occurring near their personnel, facilities and assets—to seamlessly visualize their national or global footprint and better assess the full scope of potential business disruptions. Risk management capabilities make it simple for security teams to coordinate cross-functionally throughout the bank to plan for, simulate and activate rapid responses to high-impact events.
These capabilities vastly simplify the end-user experience by automating the process of intelligence gathering, prioritizing and alerting. So, teams can respond to incidents and critical events faster.
Importantly, they easily integrate with a bank’s security workflows and can be scaled and developed over time. It’s possible to start simple and focus on imminent threats with selective alerts of a certain criticality, based on a certain proximity of assets. Then they can mature over time. The key point is to get value quickly.
Early risk warning helps strengthen security posture and overall resilience
Given that resilience is a major boardroom issue, it’s critical to eliminate the blind spots and gain comprehensive situational awareness. The security and credibility of the organization—and indeed the leaders themselves—is at stake. Cyber or physical incidents may impact shareholder and customer confidence and can damage the reputations of internal teams. The ability to rapidly detect potential threats and high-impact events and provide timely, well-informed responses is therefore essential.
AI-powered, real-time threat intelligence has a central role to play in supporting key areas of resilience in the banking industry. When considering a solution, keep in mind the need to:
- Avoid overcomplication: complex challenges need sophisticated solutions. It’s equally important not to overwhelm the process. Threat intelligence tools don’t have to be complicated to deploy or difficult to use, and they can be scaled over time.
- Enhance collaborative efforts and a shared understanding of risk: establish cross-functional teams of security experts, IT professionals and risk management personnel or implement formal processes for different security and risk teams to collaborate more effectively.
- Prioritize fast onboarding: speed is key when deploying new threat intelligence security measures. Look for solutions that can be swiftly integrated into existing systems to minimize disruption.
- Immediate value: choose solutions that provide quick wins as well as longer-term strategic value. Start simple and focus on gaining intelligence to address imminent threats and offer tangible benefits. This will also reduce ‘intelligence overload’. Expand intelligence gathering capability as you become more familiar with the system.
- Continual improvement: Recognize that resilience and continuity planning is an ongoing process. Regularly evaluate and refine existing risk strategies and ensure effective intelligence gathering based on trends in the threat landscape, industry best practices and evolving technologies.
Learn more about how Dataminr Pulse for Corporate Security provides real-time threat intelligence to banks, enabling them to build, strengthen and maintain business resilience.
