A Look Ahead: #FinTech Cybersecurity Safety in 2020

Left to right: Noah Kroloff, Amy Hess, Peter Cavicchia & Bryan Cunningham

How we can all make our companies, our cities and our nation safer is top of mind everywhere. Each year at the annual Summit on Security presented by Fiserv at the #9/11 Memorial & Museum, experts and national leaders come together to discuss the critical need for organizational resilience and vision in the face of heightened security threats.

This year, I spoke as part of the panel Keeping Ahead of the Threat, which examined key threat areas in the quickly evolving cybersecurity landscape, as well as the security infrastructure surrounding those areas.

The panel was moderated by Bryan Cunningham, the Executive Director at UC Irvine’s Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute (CPRI). I was joined by fellow panelists Amy Hess, the Executive Assistant Director of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch, and Noah Kroloff, the Principal and Co-Founder of Global Security and Innovative Strategies.

Cyber security strategic planning in Fintech is complex, involving issues such as rapidly changing data use regulation, consumer consent, and the ever-present threat of supply-chain, state-sponsored and other forms of attack. The areas of largest risk range from account data and personally identifiable info to high speed trading models.

In addition to preparing for external malicious threats, you also need to prepare for internal mistakes and errors in judgement. Nonetheless, consumers want the option of open banking. That is the future of financial services, and the industry must make the transition. As we addressed in Keeping Ahead of the Threat, this will require streamlined integration approaches as well as highly effective data-centric security measures.