#China #Pegasus #Google

Data Security & privacy - top priorities

Data security and privacy are top priorities while using digital banking following the Covid-19 pandemic. In the coming days banks are expected to launch more cyber-security and privacy features. The sharp rise in the number of scams during the pandemic has contributed to this fear. The scammers and fraudsters potentially have access to some of the data which has been lost over the last few years, now they are combining this with social engineering skills. The increased sophistication and targeted attack brings consumers and Banks at risk, now banks also finds difficulty to differentiate between good and bad actors. There is urgency for banks to increase their digital transformation, and do so at pace. “On the digital transformation side we can see financial institutions moving to cloud, including industry-specific cloud, as well as adopting emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) or data analytics, and overall, much cleverer solutions end to end in the context of security. Quite often that means that financial institutions will need to use trusted solutions from third parties, and do that at pace so they don't have to spend 12-24 months validating those solutions.

The pandemic pushed more customers towards digital banking, bringing these concerns to the forefront. A survey found a 15% drop in customers visiting physical bank branches after the first lockdown ended. However, despite this, YouGov also found that only 15% of respondents had a digital-only bank account. The pandemic acted as a catalyst on both sides, on the consumer side for adopting digital services, and on the bank side, because branches were shut, they had to find more innovative ways to enhance self-service channels. Additionally, younger groups were more likely to be interested in AI being incorporated in their banking. One element of this AI service is chatbots and other text-base.