Securing an Embedded Finance Ecosystem

The world is more connected than it has ever been in the course of human history. Data is gathered, transferred, and analysed with the aim of enriching the online experience from all angles. If done correctly and responsibly, this connectivity and data can be used to create meaningful and productive systems that aid our everyday lives for activities like ordering groceries online or receiving payments from clients. With great power, however, comes great responsibility. This is why information security is arguably the most important aspect of all these systems and as an information security professional, this is what makes our jobs both complex and immensely interesting.

Information Security, or InfoSec, and the Fintech industry have a close and sometimes turbulent relationship, but for the most part it is relatively healthy. This is because it needs to be. Financial technology, and therefore financial data is extremely sensitive, making it high risk and dangerous if in the wrong hands. Embedded finance throws some extra risks and food for thought into the mix due to the very nature in which it operates.

Not sure what Embedded Finance is? In a nutshell, it is the embedding of financial products or functionality within applications or services that may not necessarily be known for offering these services.

This means that with the introduction of additional parties, the stakes are much higher from a security perspective and we, as an InfoSec team, need to up our game! We’re happy to say that this is exactly what we’ve done. By leveraging top people, processes, and technologies, we have been able to design, develop and implement layered security controls within all our critical environments. From DDOS protection and WAF controls to Data Loss Prevention and Secure Coding Frameworks, the entire Technology team has been able to ensure that bad actors have the hardest of times attempting to breach our systems or implant malicious activities. In addition to this, regular backups and redundancies for critical systems have both been put in place to ensure a high level of system availability and integrity. With a diverse InfoSec team in place driving innovation and monitoring against threats and anomalous behaviour, the institution can continue to operate, while also developing and delivering a top-quality service offering.

We take pride in not only creating systems and APIs that are easy to use, robust and highly available, but also as secure as possible. Multi-factor authentication is enforced both internally and externally for human and machine interaction ensuring standard attacks are much harder to execute against our users and APIs. We also implement comprehensive and regular information security awareness and education campaigns to keep users up to date with the latest and greatest threats and how they can act as the human firewall to keep the institution, its data and its clients safe, while also instilling a sense of pride and purpose in doing so.

So, as you can see, the Financial Technology industry, Embedded Finance and Information Security are deeply intertwined with each other to provide easy to use, ubiquitous, highly available and secure financial services to business and individuals across the world every day and in the blink of an eye.

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