Cyber Services
Secure Your Success: Cyber Solutions for Financial Services and Insurance
As the financial services and insurance industry faces a plethora of new risks and challenges amidst an evolving threat and regulatory landscape, tackling operational resilience has never been more vital for firms. But with barriers such as legacy technology or manual data processing proving a hindrance to many, achieving operational resilience and mitigating risk can be extremely challenging.
Data breaches pose significant threats to financial services and insurance organisations, including millions of pounds of financial losses, reputational damage and regulatory penalties. The exposure of sensitive customer and business information can also lead to identity theft and loss of competitive advantage.
To mitigate these risks, financial services and insurance organisations must implement strong cybersecurity measures, such as multi-factor authentication, encryption and continuous monitoring. Regular security audits and vulnerability assessments are essential, along with a robust incident response plan to manage breaches effectively.
SCC’s Retained Incident Response (IR) service is delivered 24/7/365, from a dedicated team accredited by NCSC providing the full spectrum of legal, compliance and communications services. By establishing a Retainer for IR, we ensure that we can promptly mobilise our experienced IR team, who will already have familiarity with your systems, networks and operations.
The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is a new European framework that focuses on embedding a more robust and resilient approach to delivering digital capabilities for financial entities.
To comply with DORA and bolster their defences against cyberattacks, financial services companies should take an all-encompassing and holistic approach to cybersecurity that includes an extensive solution that provides suitable protection.
Our Managed Extended Detection and Response service (MXDR) offers round-the-clock protection across your entire estate. This service ensures faster resolution times, lower security costs and smarter proactive prevention tactics from supplier risk across your entire estate so you can rest assured your security is taken care of. SCC's Managed Security Operations Centre (SOC) Services includes our Aegis platform, which leverages advanced automation and AI to enrich, triage and respond to potential threats, reducing false positives and allowing our analysts to accelerate investigations.
The adoption of applied AI and generative AI (GenAI) also introduces substantial regulatory risks, with increasing scrutiny from regulators such as those enforcing the EU AI Act. Financial services organisations need to align their security strategies, particularly in areas like reporting, governance and data privacy, to comply with these emerging regulations.
Companies should aim to publish guidelines that support firms through the development of AI systems and ensure that security still is at the centre of implementation.
Once they have an AI policy in place, supported by a robust project plan, they can control what information is available and to restrict wider system access, including protecting intellectual property, client data or personal information, in line with UK data protection laws and financial regulation.
SCC has made significant investments into its AI practice, leveraging the technology to bolster its cybersecurity managed services, as well as providing expert guidance and consultative engagements on how to extract maximum value from this emerging technology.
Outcomes we enable:
This Bank is the only UK high street bank with a customer-led ethical policy which is incorporated into the Bank's Articles of Association. It provides personal banking services including current accounts, credit cards, online and mobile banking, personal loans, mortgage loans, as well as commercial and retail banking.
The Bank had been part of a larger parent group for many years. In 2017 it separated from the group as it financially restructured. Part of this business separation included the requirement to completely separate the IT infrastructure and services, which to date had been combined in many operational areas. These separation and restructuring activities cost over £700m. It also reduced the group parent company’s stake holding in the Bank from 20% to less than 1%. Challenges faced by the Bank included:
Removal of unsupported Windows XP
Ageing desktop estate
Full technical and operational separation
Regulatory Compliance
Supplier Assurance
As part of this business separation, the Bank required support to completely separate the IT infrastructure and services. The first step involved migrating their application layer to a trusted third party.
SCC took over the management of the extensive desktop estate, including the desktop support platforms under a managed service contract, which included a contract to undertake a complete desktop transformation. As part of this contract SCC now provides support and governance from its cyber team to align to the Bank’s in-house team, ensuring the high standards implemented are maintained and that the Bank meets the regulatory requirements for its business operation.
Technical controls continue to evolve through joint working parties across the Bank and SCC, covering desktop, server, infrastructure services, communication and security monitoring technologies.
SCC were able to reduce cost to the Bank but also allow internal resources to focus on the Bank’s core business proposition through having confidence in the SCC cyber team to ensure the supporting technology meets the desired outcome. We continue to support and advise the Bank on multiple aspects across the cyber security landscape as they journey towards cloud and solution consolidation.
