The FStech Podcast

There has never been a time when FS firms didn't have to deal with monitoring illicit employee communications. But the introduction of ever more channels of communication, with new apps appearing seemingly every month, means there are more ways than ever for mishaps - and malicious activity - to fall under the radar. Organisations now need to shift through unprecedented volumes of metadata to pick...

Research shows that organisations with compromised user credentials (normally through data breach) are many times more likely to fall victim to a ransomware attack. And when you consider that the rate of ransomware attacks has more than doubled in the past year, it's no wonder that the cost of cyber liability insurance - which is designed to support a business in the event of an attack or a breach...

The face of fraud is changing. Whether you look to the rise of romance scams, purchase scams, or the emergence of new types of crypto and investment fraud, novel strands and variants are emerging almost every day. And with many UK workers still working remotely, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the increased attack surface which the shift to remote working can offer. Though financial institu...

Despite the best efforts of regulators, organised crime continues to represent a huge part of the global economy. Criminal groups are funnelling billions of dollars of revenue every year through accounts, which needs to appear to be legitimate. With the large transactions involved, criminals are favouring companies as convenient fronts to launder money at scale, because consumer accounts simply ca...

The tidal wave of digital financial services driven by the pandemic has put data and analytics squarely at the centre of growth strategies for FSIs. But as customers demand ever-more personalised and efficient services many firms are struggling to keep up, with vital data stuck in silos and legacy systems making it a near impossible challenge to draw out key insights. To tackle this challenge, man...

In today's world of digital platforms, the insurance industry is racing to catch up with customer demand for real-time, personalised services across a range of channels and apps. But as the InsurTech competitors step up the speed and ease of access to insurance and begin to build the Open Insurance ecosystem, more established players are struggling to prioritise and orchestrate the cultural, techn...

Financial services institutions are increasingly turning to hybrid cloud solutions as they modernize their organizations and look to meet customer demand for digital services. But what does this actually look like? Taking an open source approach to cloud can also help to overcome some of the key pitfalls many FSIs fall into when it comes to cloud transformation, such as cloud-vendor lock-in, growi...

In the last 12 months, a digital tidal wave has hit the financial services industry, leading to a corresponding surge in data volumes. But as the data landscape becomes more complex, many financial services providers are buckling under pressure to ensure that more data translates into greater value for the customer and better business decision making. With data locked in silos across disparate bus...

Trading has traditionally always been an office-based activity. However, the demands of the pandemic didn't make many allowances for tradition or for company culture. Firms had to adapt their trading operations to a work from anywhere model practically overnight regardless of their circumstances. In response, many FSIs are turning towards voice-based technology and biometrics to replicate the bene...

The rapid rise in digital and online activity has opened up a new battleground in the fight against fraud for financial services providers (FSIs), who face a range of emerging fraud vectors and increasingly sophisticated scams. And while customers moving online provides the perfect cover for criminals looking to carry out authorised push payments (APP), synthetic ID and transaction fraud, other tr...

Over the past eighteen months, the UK financial industry has been forced to react quickly to a rapidly changing fraud landscape. As the nature of fraud activity shifts, banks and other financial institutions are facing a myriad of new risks, threats, and challenges. Meanwhile, the coronavirus pandemic has had a huge impact on people's lives, forcing the sector to deal with increasingly difficult c...

In the on-demand economy, customers now expect to be able to engage with their service provider - be it a streaming service, online retailer, or banking provider, at the click of a button and on the channel of their choice. As a result, financial services providers are under mounting pressure to leverage data, AI and automation to provide a personalised and seamless customer experience, whether th...

In the age of data-driven financial services, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have become the essential building blocks of digital channels such as the apps and online banking services used by millions of customers. But as the data ecosystem evolves, and Open Banking shifts into Open Finance and Open Data, APIs are becoming far more than just gateways for data exchange between applicatio...

As consumers adapt their habits and increasingly transact online, demand for digital financial services has risen exponentially. As a result, financial institutions (FIs) are under pressure to provide smooth onboarding processes, featuring the most up to date and easy to use technology combined with security and compliance - or risk losing the customer at the first hurdle. To delve further into th...

The past year has brought unprecedented disruption for financial services providers and their customers. For many, the pandemic-induced risk landscape has created new challenges for FSIs including balancing disruption detection, digesting information from all over the globe, and managing a co-ordinated response. From local COVID-19 lockdown mandates affecting physical branches to cyber criminals t...

As the workforce prepares for the long-term shift to hybrid working, financial services organisations are considering how the established operating model should change to maintain both security and agility. But hybrid working comes with its own challenges. Whether it's personal devices accessing corporate data and applications or cybercriminals exploiting vulnerabilities opened up by remote access...

Banks are under immense pressure to undergo rapid transformation and roll out innovative new products and services at the same pace as their competitors, while at the same time ensuring the high-quality customer experiences which consumers now expect. Attempting large scale digital transformation in a short period of time always carries a degree of risk when it comes to operational continuity, wit...

The shift to remote working has triggered an explosion of digital communications challenges for financial services firms - and a corresponding surge in the data privacy risk. As employees send millions of emails and messages across digital collaboration platforms, financial institutions are in a race against time to protect their systems, employees and reputation from the devastating consequences...

Open Banking is already proving to be a significant disruptor in the current financial services market. It's providing a new way to elevate customer experience by harnessing data to improve services and offer a much wider range of products. But what if Open Banking could be taken one step further? Imagine an ecosystem that goes beyond the standard format and instead reaches customers outside of bu...

With just months to go until 6AMLD is set to be fully enforced in June, organisations are scrambling to adapt to an environment that assigns additional liability for breaches to senior managers and threatens heavier sanctions across the board, with organisations all too aware of the financial and reputational risk should the regulator come knocking. But with the anti-money laundering risk landscap...

There have been easier times for customer onboarding. The money laundering industry is currently estimated at being worth around two trillion worldwide, every year, and the challenges posed to FSIs by the introduction of the EU's 6th AML directive, Brexit, and the pandemic are well established. But these challenges are amplified by the fact many organisations are still unaware of where the data tr...

FSIs continue to spend ever-increasing billions on protecting their data, as high-profile threats such as ransomware fill the headlines, and highly complex supply chain attacks like Solarwinds shock the world. However, taking advantage of how organisations move digital assets remains an evergreen attack vector for cybercriminals. While insider threat might be associated with vengeful employees or...

As the demand for digital services skyrocketed during the pandemic, financial services providers had to move faster than ever before to provide continuity for their customers across digital channels and platforms. And while retail banks make headway against the digital challengers, many sectors, notably wealth management, investment and asset management are struggling to keep up with the pace of c...

With the coronavirus crisis prompting a vast shift from in-branch operations to online, like most industries, financial services has needed to adapt. Open Banking is also disrupting the market, with both banks and FinTechs looking to boost customer experience by harnessing data to offer improved services and a wider range of products. Both the shift to online and the disruption of Open banking hav...

Financial sector firms are already struggling to keep up with the ever-changing performance demands of applications, and the current pressure on firms to improve time to market and scale rapidly is only adding to these concerns. Automation and object storage can complement core banking applications, which can be difficult migrate to the cloud, and enable better monitoring, management, and optimisa...