Over the years, the Customer Experience and Customer Relationship Management, Cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), Social Media, E-commerce, Mobility, Big Data, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning, BlockChain and other technologies have significantly disrupted the Banking, Financial Institutions and Insurance verticals, especially after the onset of COVID-19. The cloudification of core banking, Insurtech and other Fintech platform & systems, importance of omnichannel experience, the rise of neobanks, the adoption of Payment wallets, digital lending, AI assisted chatbots, cryptocurrency, digital supply chain and intelligent/ hyper automation continue to accelerate digital transformation and optimisation in the Financial Services Industry (FSI) space, right across traditional players as well as unicorns and start-ups.

This ever-increasing digital and technology penetration, along with continued hybrid working in 2023 is naturally resulting in implosion of potential attack surfaces, points of breach and vulnerabilities across the extended FSI enterprise. These factors along with ever-rising stringent regulations, compliance requirements, fines and penalties, 5G networks and proliferation of sophisticated and organized hackers, other malicious actors and the dark web have made cybersecurity and resilience even more important for the FSI industry. Even prior to the pandemic, this paper by the New York Federal Reserve highlights that FSI companies have 300 times more propensity for cyber-attacks vis-à-vis companies in other verticals.

Since the advent of the pandemic, there have been many attacks, breaches, leaks and adverse cyber events over the past 2.5 years such as Ransomware attacks at Chubb Insurance, Diebold Nixdorf, Flagstar Bank, Bank of Costa Rica, Morgan Stanley, Banco Estado, Brazil National Treasury, Travelex, and AXA Insurance, attacks on National Bank of Pakistan, Pichincha Bank, and Porto Seguro Insurance, to breaches at Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Experian, Robinhood and Sequoia Capital, insider leaks at Postbank and Scotia Bank, the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack at New Zealand Stock Exchange, Supply chain attacks…