Sibos 24: it’s all about trust

Only by working together can the financial services sector ensure customers and users maintain their trust in the security of the industry and its systems.

That’s the view of Lee Ross, Domain Lead, Payments at ANZ Institutional, who believes trust is what “the cornerstone of our industry is built on”.

“It's important to gain and keep consumer confidence around that trust,” Ross said on podcast with Leigh Mahoney, Head of Wholesale Digital at ANZ. “We need to do that by rapidly adopting new technologies that underpin this.”

Data, the “one big tool in the war on security”, was the key to driving that innovation, Ross said – including in emerging technology like artificial intelligence.

“And we've got to find a way to collaborate more [around] how we share and utilise this data across multiple sources, to be able to build up a greater defence across various security elements,” he said.

That “increased industry collaboration”, according to Ross, needs to come alongside a commitment to ensure security is at the heart of everything the sector builds.

“One of the key parts is to make sure you integrate security from the start,” he said. “It's not an afterthought. It needs to be the pre-eminent part of it.”

Ross and Mahoney were speaking as part of a series of On Air conversations held ahead of the Sibos financial services conference. You can listen to an edited version of the conversation below.

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Differentiator

Mahoney said the payments space was “all based on trust”, and there was an opportunity for security to be a “differentiator” for businesses in the market.

“And I think there's also a great opportunity for these providers, whether they're payment-services providers, banks or whatever, to make sure they're collaborating in a way that drives cyber resilience,” he said.

The fact of the matter, according to Mahoney, was there would always be bad actors out to benefit financially from cybercrime and fraud.

“We really need to make sure we're protecting ourselves and our providers,” he said. “And [ensure] others are protecting themselves against not only cybersecurity, but helping their customers out with cyber fraud.”

Real time

Ross said the benefits brought to the payments space by real-time technology also brought increased responsibilities around security.

“We've got to match our real-time digitisation of payments with our real-time things like alerts, with our real-time information back to customers, with our real-time interception, with our real-time fraud checking,” he said.

“Real time is really an ecosystem that needs to be built up all around in order to both facilitate, but protect as well.”

The experts also touched on the likelihood of superapps taking off in Australia, and the Sibos financial services conference. Listen to the podcast above to find out more.

This note reflects the edited version of the conversation as it appears on the podcast.