How Identity Security Can Protect Modern Banks and Credit Unions

The nature of the financial services industry is evolving rapidly. Modern banks and credit unions, in particular, are employing technology to transform the way they do business – optimizing operations to increase efficiency and protect against cyberattacks.

Financial institutions process millions of transactions containing vast quantities of financial and personally identifiable information every day. Couple the value of this information with the devastation that can result if it falls into the wrong hands, and it’s clear to see why banks and credit unions are both risk adverse and highly regulated.

The Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) and Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) are US federal laws requiring financial institutions to establish privacy and security controls and communicate how they use their customers’ private information. These important laws further put pressure on institutions to tighten their identity security technology.

To ensure a constant state of compliance and cybersecurity, progressive financial institutions rely on SailPoint to automate and streamline their identity security. Institutions are able to efficiently discover, secure and manage every type of identity – from employees and contractors, to machines and bots. Using SailPoint’s identity platform, banks and credit unions can properly govern users and their access to data, applications and systems – ensuring that only the right people have access to the right information.

Identity Is the New Perimeter

The act of banking is no longer contained within the four walls of a building. Mobile functionality, blockchain integration, and the emergence of banking as a service (BaaS) have led to growing cyber threats and compliance requirements – and a critical need to close security gaps.

Despite significant investment in workforce training, banking has one of the highest rates of insider data breaches. Complex corporate structures and departmental silos hinder management’s visibility into roles, responsibilities, and data access. Cap that off with traditional reliance on spreadsheets and manual processes for tracking data access and user identities, and you have an environment that’s rife with potential for inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Along with creating an auditing and reporting nightmare, this situation introduces gaps in the system that are prime for exploitation by threat actors.

To meet compliance requirements and streamline operations, financial institutions must automate business processes and embrace new identity security practices. Identity security gives financial institutions unmatched visibility while automating and accelerating the management of all user identities, entitlements, systems, data and cloud services. Through artificial intelligence and machine learning, SailPoint enables banks and credit unions to make smart access decisions while uncovering and remediating hidden or unknown issues that may pose inherent risk

Provision with Confidence

Manual processes cannot provide the same efficiency and security for granting access to employees as an automated process.

• Improve day-one productivity by quickly onboarding new workers.
• Easily and securely remove or reinstate access, once an employee leaves, changes jobs, or returns from furlough.
• Develop strong data access methods to protect confidentiality.

Protect at Scale

Whether data is structured or unstructured, employees can only access, manage and share data for which they are authorized.

• Gain a 360° view of all user access including partners, vendors, employees, contractors, and non-human identities.
• Get insight into users with potentially risky or abnormal access and receive recommendations on whether it is safe to grant access.
• Manage and govern access across proprietary and legacy solutions and sensitive data stored on-premises and in the cloud.
• Protect and back up data with a tiered data protection approach.

Comply with Certainty

Tracking all access activity that happens within the organization makes auditing and reporting a more streamlined, cost-effective process.

• Establish an overall architecture framework guiding your enterprise information technology.
• Automate, simplify, and accelerate access certification campaigns from months to days.
• Maintain and generate an audit trail of accounts, entitlements, policies and actions to address audit needs with ease.
• Enforce access controls and fine-grained entitlements that prevent conflicts of interest, information theft, and compliance violations.

“Compliance is a never-ending chore. By using SailPoint to automate it, we are saving a significant amount of time and money — and improving accuracy”

- C-level Executive, US Consumer Bank

Evolve with Business Requirements

Business never stands still – nor should your security. SailPoint’s identity platform is built to learn and evolve with the business, providing the ability to upgrade and innovate security processes with minimal disruption.

• Build and maintain roles to help ensure access always adheres to security and compliance policies.
• Spot excessive privileges or orphaned and dormant accounts that create unseen attack vectors.
• Ensure permissions and entitlements are automatically adjusted when employee roles change, during phases of expansion, or in the wake of a merger or acquisition.
• Eliminate help desk calls and keep IT personnel focused on high-value tasks by arming workers with self-service capabilities to request, approve and certify access, as well as the ability to manage passwords from any device.

“The impact of our identity program has been disruptive – in a positive way. With SailPoint, we’re confident our program will stand the test of time, evolving as the business requirements change down the road.”

- Jochem de Ru, Product Owner, ABN AMRO

SailPoint Advantages at a Glance

Industry Leadership

Modernize your business with the identity management and governance solution that consistently earns the highest rankings from all major analysts – and is continually trusted by more than 95% of its customers year over year.

Enterprise Scalability

Scale to address the changing needs and complex corporate structures of the financial services industry with a solution that was built to govern millions of identities, billions of points of access and tens of thousands of applications and data sources.

Regulatory Compliance

Lower the risk of penalties and reputational damage by ensuring compliance with Federal Trade Commission, federal banking and regulatory authorities, and oversight agencies.

Flexible Deployment Options

Meet your unique operational requirements, including legacy equipment and applications.

Connect to Everything

Manage and govern access to all on-premises and cloud applications and data through proven connectors and integrations.

1. Frost & Sullivan. “Securing a Better Return: Leading Banks Turning to Advanced Identity Management and Governance to Protect – and Grow – the Business.”