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Banks are adopting new data strategies as they get ready for a world without cookies

By Banking

Financial services are heavily regulated and rely on data. Data is a crucial resource for financial marketers who spend money on digital advertising and track the effectiveness of their campaigns. However, a number of applications like attribution, frequency limiting, behavioral targeting, and lookalike audiences appear to be in danger as third-party cookies (TPCs), a significant source of third-party data, come under increasing data privacy demands. Financial marketers are now concentrating their efforts on adopting data methods that enable them to properly utilize client data.

Why Are the Cookies Crumbling?

Cookies are pieces of code that vary in how they gather user information. When a user visits a website, first-party cookies are created by the website and saved on the user’s computer. These domain-specific cookies gather fundamental surfing data to encourage return visits. TPCs, on the other hand, are established by a third-party server, such as an AdTech, and can be accessible on any website that loads the code for the third-party servers. Users have no awareness into the numerous domains where their information is shared, which discourages TPCs.

These TPCs are increasingly being phased out as a result of strict data protection requirements (GDPR and CCPA). Among the first web browsers to implement restrictions relating to TPCs were Safari and Mozilla. The most recent declaration by Google that it will phase out TPCs by the middle of 2023 is the icing on the cake because Google Chrome accounts for more than half of all web traffic worldwide.

Due to the fact that Google and Facebook get almost 70% of all US digital advertising spending, this news raises a challenge regarding price-pinching. These are regarded as safe even after the cookie’s demise because they solely use first-party audience data. These walled gardens appear attractive for businesses trying to advertise there since they control huge amounts of predictable data. These gardens do provide some unique difficulties for businesses, though:
Portability limitations or the inability to connect walled gardens’ campaign interactions to a brand’s CRM database outside of their ecosystem; No visibility into ad campaign performance (just an aggregated view);

Digital Banking Frauds: Are We Ready?

By Banking

In the age of digital banking and financial services, as well as the rise of FinTech and RegTech, banks around the world are focusing on modernizing and digitizing their operations in order to stay competitive and improve customer experience. Customers’ adoption of a digital lifestyle, as well as the availability of high-speed internet via mobile service providers and free Wi-Fi in most public places, has made digital banking and online transactions on the go more convenient. Furthermore, the push for digitalization has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Innovative solutions to overcome the outbreak’s disruptions through digital transactions have become the financial systems’ saviors. Furthermore, the digitization of financial systems improves service efficiency in many areas, including onboarding a customer, protecting from fraud, regulatory monitoring, servicing and offboarding.

Financial crime compliance, on the other hand, has become easier because identifying the source of digitally originated transactions is easier to track than cash or cash equivalent transactions. The Financial Crime Compliance (FCC) unit’s reporting to regulators in the event of any transactions exceeding the mandated threshold has become faster and easier, ensuring the detection and prevention of fraudulent transactions through online channels in real time. Furthermore, digital transactions have simplified the screening of the device fingerprint, geolocation coordinates of the device used, browser data, and other behavior details and contextual data for the customer that can be stored in the bank’s system.

Criminals in the BFS industry, on the other hand, are catching up with the evolution of technology, looking for loopholes in the system and ways to exploit them. Identity theft and account takeovers have emerged as major concerns for financial institutions, with incidents on the rise in the current non-face-to-face banking environment. When lost or hacked, handheld devices, which are thought to be the most convenient banking channel, may become an open book of financial secrets. On handheld mobile devices, the browser stores personally identifiable information (PII) such as full name and aliases used, address, email address, passwords, card numbers, national identifiers such as SSN, browser history, cookies, and cache. Downloaded bank statements, contacts, device location history (GPS), SMS, emails, and recently deleted files may also be stored on the device.

When a person falls victim to a scam, the scammers or hackers can swindle the victims’ accounts without their knowledge in order to circumvent the fraud detection parameter deployed by their FI. Scammers use victim’s own device connected to victim’s own network to siphon money from their accounts, fooling fraud monitoring systems’ device fingerprinting and network IP tracking.

Countering the Risk

First and foremost, it is the customer’s responsibility to prevent fraud, which can be ensured by implementing some best practices to seal data leakage and raising awareness about how to avoid scams. They should be advised to protect their digital banking device from hacking via phishing or SMS-shing, to validate the authenticity of links received in SMS or emails before opening, to avoid using non-secure internet connectivity for banking transactions, and to use multifactor authentication for mobile banking apps such as a password, biometric, or PIN to access and install only genuine banking apps from trusted sources and authenticated banking websites. FIs, on the other hand, must improve their digital security and fraud prevention strategies to keep up with the ever-changing fraud trends in the digital environment.

The first step in controlling fraud attempts by FIs should be to educate their customers on market scams and fraud trends on a regular basis. Furthermore, FIs must implement machine learning-driven analytical solutions to reduce false alerts, which may negatively impact customer experience through multiple customer-connects and a decline in genuine transactions, among other things.

The Road Ahead

In the future, FIs can use linkage analysis in conjunction with social media activity analysis to identify fraud trends. This will reduce friction in the customer experience by removing the unnecessary connection for transaction authenticity. Cognitive solutions, such as automated communication with customers via auto dialer, push message, or SMS, could be an alternative option for customer connection.

While this is not an exhaustive list of counter-financial-crime actions, it is an evolving space in which FIs must track developments in order to update customers’ knowledge, processes, and controls accordingly.

Business leaders are gradually realizing the enormous potential of digitization, and digital customer onboarding has become the industry buzzword.

Create Progressive Customer Journeys with Digital Onboarding

Palto Alto: Making a Difference in Cybersecurity

By Cybersecurity

A career in cybersecurity is now a little closer for a group of students from Del Rio High School in Texas, thanks to the Palo Alto Networks Cybersecurity Academy and the dedicated employees and teachers who put the curriculum into action.

The program teaches students fundamental cybersecurity skills while also laying the groundwork for future roles and opportunities in the industry. The Palo Alto Networks course included a test and certificate earned by the students, and it was paired with a school district program called Project Lead The Way, which is aimed at fostering interest in STEM careers.

“By offering this program, we gain a better educated user and possibly future cybersecurity engineers as we fight to achieve our goal of a more secure digital world,” said Lalo Ruiz, Senior Manager, Consulting Services at Palo Alto Networks. “I want to ensure that our next generation and future generations of digital citizens have better skills to navigate day-to-day functions safely.” In addition, I want to give students from my hometown other career options.”

“I am so grateful for the opportunity Palo Alto Networks has given my students,” said Del Rio High School teacher John Reed. “It opens doors and pathways that students would not have otherwise.”

The course educated students on the current cybersecurity landscape and assisted them in recognizing and potentially mitigating attacks on enterprise networks and mission critical infrastructure. Students also learned how to set up and configure security zones, authentication, and policies on a next-generation firewall for the first time.

Working with the students was a labor of love for Ruiz, a Marine who spent years discovering and turning his passion for computers and cybersecurity into a career.

“By providing this curriculum to Del Rio students, we are opening up other careers in the digital space,” Ruiz explained. “I want to reach out to students who are dissatisfied and unsure of their calling.” I’d like to present them with another excellent option. I’d like to see the academy program and Del Rio High School produce the next generation of CIOs and CTOs.”

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