In recent years, financial services organisations find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place, as competition increases alongside tightening regulations. The pressure is on the organisations to constantly deliver top-notch services and applications to their customers as well as employees. Coupled with the fact that the list of regulations is always growing, financial services organisations must deal with the risks of data breaches and other security challenges.
In order for financial services organisations to stand out from the rest of the pack, they need to focus on innovating. As a result, many organisations are relying on digital transformations to enhance the way the company operates and the way they interact with potential customers. Making their services digital is a path to ensuring efficiency and productivity, which will confer a competitive advantage upon the organisation.
However, digital transformation and innovation comes with the opportunity cost of having more risks to manage. Having more digital applications and services for the customers’ convenient access will also mean creating more targets for criminals and hackers to exploit. This can, in turn, increase the potential for frauds, digital scams, identity theft, or account compromise.
As a result, some financial services organisations choose to privilege security over innovation so as to mitigate these digital security risks. The number of access points to financial tools and accounts may be reduced, to allow for easier management and access control. Some companies may choose to wait for newer technologies to be introduced into the industry. However, these alternatives will cause the quality of user experience and convenience to suffer. The financial services industry is thus burdened with the dilemma of innovation versus security. With a rising population of tech-savvy digital consumers, being able to access one’s financial systems via mobile has become an important factor. At the same time, employees in the financial services organisations are also empowered to do their jobs more efficiently and streamline work processes to boost productivity levels.
With the introduction of identity and access management(IAM) systems, financial service providers no longer have to stress out over the balance between security and innovation. With IAM, companies can ensure that only the correct people have the correct level of access to specific resources. Moreover, with single sign-on (SSO) and two factor authentication (2FA) among other security features, organisations no longer have to worry over financial data breaches. This gives both the company and the customer a peace of mind. Customers can enjoy a more seamless and cohesive user experience, without security being sacrificed.
The adoption of modern IAM also spells out a future of possibilities for financial service organisations, as their IT teams can thus concentrate on digital transformation initiatives that will be executed on a larger scale. By starting from identity-defined security, a balance can be struck between innovation and security, and they will not seem like opposing ends of a spectrum. IAM solutions thus enable financial services providers to get the best of both worlds from security and innovation.