5 Reasons Why Financial Sector Needs Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Data security is the top concern in the financial services world.
Between strict data regulations and evolving cyber threats, the financial industry has no room for error when it comes to securing customer and company data.
It remains a constant challenge for the consumer-centric industry to secure and manage identities while providing convenient, seamless, and real-time access that consumers demand.
The Banking and Financial Institutes (BFIs) often face an increasing number of threats from targeted attacks to Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS), and from phishing to point-of-sale and ATM security issues.
And the stakes are significant for these institutes.
The average loss per incident for a consumer customer suffering from financial fraud is USD 1,446, rising to USD 10,312 for business customers. And 59% of banks expect financial fraud losses to increase over the next three years.
At this juncture, Identity and Access Management (IAM) has emerged as the need of the hour.
IAM is the secure choice for financial institutions to provide authorized access to information at any time, from anywhere, for employees, business partners, and customers.
Here, we bring you some key reasons why ‘Identity and Access Management’ is essential for banking and financial institutes:
5 Reasons Why Financial Services Sector Needs IAM
1) Improves Security Posture
IAM solutions ensure that the right people have the right access to the right information. The BFIs can protect and manage access to privileged accounts with enterprise-grade password security and privileged access management. The banks can provide seamless and secure user authentication to their native, web, mobile, and cloud applications with IAM solutions.
IAM capabilities such as Single Sign-on (SSO), Multi-factor Authentication (MFA), and biometric identification ensure that customers are authentic and entitled to the services they are claiming. Customers can be instantly recognized and authenticated before a transaction is processed.
2) Enhances End-user Experience
SSO capabilities provide users with one identity for authentication across all connected online banking services. Users can access all applications linked to their bank with one secure identity, rather than requiring separate credentials for each service.
Moreover, self-service account management allows customers to easily manage their own identity details, such as password resets and communication preferences.
This, in turn, helps improve customer relationships, gain trust, and enhance user experience.
3) Ensures Compliance
Owing to their structure and charter, banks and financial institutes are subjected to various regulatory compliances such as PCI, DSS, SOX, and GDPR. With the implementation of IAM solutions, BFIs are assured of achieving governance requirements such as assessing risks, enforcing policies, reducing frauds, and auditing compliance. Relying on IAM not only ensures compliance, but it also helps develop and maintain more secure systems and applications.
4) Drives Efficiency
The modern IAM speeds identity recognition and automates processes that currently require human supervision, thereby driving efficiency improvements.
For instance, the banks can speed-up customer onboarding by capturing biometric identity in the branch when initiating customer contact. For all subsequent branch interactions, these biometrics can be used to authenticate the customer without any effort.
Moreover, user self-service options reduce the help-desk burden while improving productivity and engagement.
5) Promotes Agility
Banking and financial institutes are increasingly recognizing cloud as a destination to store data and applications and access advanced software applications. The modern IAM services help integrate new applications and quickly deploy to the cloud.
With the hybrid IAM model, one can rapidly connect SaaS applications and legacy and enterprise web applications.
Moreover, with digitization, the financial sector is also seen to evolve its digital capabilities, especially harnessing app-based mobile activities. The IAM capabilities can facilitate secure, seamless online banking services.
In Conclusion
Implementation of IAM solutions in a financial services sector imparts adequate control to organizations to streamline provisioning and de-provisioning users’ access and seamlessly undertake identity change management processes. Further, it facilitates standard approval workflows and enables the access review platform as well.
An effective IAM system promotes greater visibility into user access, policy compliance, role management, and risk assessment.
Need Support? Veritis is Here to Help!
Based out in the US, Veritis is an early adopter of Identity and Access Management Services. With more than a decade-long industry presence, we have been strategic partners to Financial, government, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and telecom, among other industries. Our offerings under IAM Solutions include Identity and Access Management, Compliance and Identity Management Readiness (CIMR), and Privileged Access Management (PAM).
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