The financial system, aware of the challenge that banking cybersecurity currently poses, is dedicating significant resources to the area. More specifically, and according to the article published by news portal Finanzas.com entitled Ciberseguridad: el gran desafío de la banca digital (Cybersecurity: Digital Banking’s Great Challenge), “it is estimated that Spanish banks spent around 4,000 million euros on technology during 2019 and that between five and ten percent of this amount was allocated for cybersecurity”. Esther García, journalist for the site, provides further details from the report published this year by the Spanish Confederation of Savings Banks (CECA), which states that “its member institutions, including Caixabank, Unicaja, Abanca, Kuxabank and Ibercaja, invested more than 1.6 billion in technology in 2019, of which 57.7 million was directed to cybersecurity and 84 million was spent on training in protection from hackers”.
And is this economic effort paying off? The answer is yes. In the words of Santiago Carbó, investment analyst and Director of Financial Studies at Funcas, “Spanish financial institutions possess systems of maximal protection against cyberattacks, and this has placed Spain among the countries with the fewest incidents of this kind due to security provided by encryption and other protection systems”. He adds, “Spain has the same problems as the rest of advanced countries in terms of phishing and fraud, but it has made great progress in early warning systems and two-factor authentication to prevent them.”
Early warning systems and banking cybersecurity
Indeed, early warning systems associated with mobile banking have become a tool to support the sector in the prevention of cyberattacks on banks, and are one of the most widely implemented and highly-developed technological products. According to Latinia, with more than 20 years of experience in developing real-time decision and communication software for the financial sector, and as Juliana Ortiz, Customer Success Manager of the company explains, “alert engines allow the bank to ensure that even if the customer is not interested in receiving certain types of notifications, the bank can guarantee they immediately see any operation or transaction that is suspected of being fraudulent”.
María José Echevarría, Sales Regional Manager for Central America at Latinia adds that “the bank’s decision engines specialised in filtering transactional events can play a very important role in the fight against cybercrime as they keep the customer informed in real time, and this allows us not only to immediately identify fraud but also to take action to prevent it from spreading”.
Latinia’s Critical Events Gateway
One of these most notable decision engines is Latinia’s Gateway, which, as María José Echevarría explains, “is an indispensable companion in the notification process for these kinds of fraud alerts, since there is no point in having an engine that identifies these events if it is not possible to inform the customer in a timely and efficient manner”.
Gateway allows for the unification, control and management of notification processes for critical events, such as OTP or two-factor authentication (2FA), separate from regular transactional messages. Its advanced management for communication providers guarantees service continuity to ensure message delivery, even in the event of connection failures with telecommunications providers. Furthermore, it is a scalable product that can be adapted to different technological infrastructures, as its architecture allows it to be deployed in any environment, particularly in clouds.
“Real-time alert services such as our Gateway product increase customers’ sense of security, and are an invaluable means of improving communication between the bank and customers in order to make them feel more secure in their digital financial transactions,” concludes Juliana Ortiz of Latinia.
Categories: Security & Compliance