Notis Iliopoulos, VP of MRC at Obrela, explains why financial institutions must move beyond checkbox compliance and adopt a governance-driven approach to cybersecurity resilience.
Managing cybersecurity risk, while also ensuring regulatory compliance has become a formidable challenge for financial institutions. Banks, insurers, and investment firms are operating in an increasingly complex environment where regulations such as NIS2, DORA, and GDPR intersect with financial compliance frameworks like Basel III, PSD2, and SOX.
As the financial sector continues its rapid digital evolution, financial organisations are also facing relentless cyber threats, ransomware attacks on global banking networks through to fraudulent activity targeting payment systems.
The backdrop to this is that many organisations are struggling with fragmented security strategies, reactive compliance efforts and an inability to translate risk data into actionable insights. In an industry where the financial and reputational damage from cyber incidents can be catastrophic, this kind of piecemeal approach to cybersecurity is not a viable option.
Compliance vs. true cybersecurity resilience
Financial institutions often separate their governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) functions from security operations (SecOps), creating silos that impede efficiency and communication. While regulators demand stringent compliance measures, compliance alone does not guarantee security. The 2017 Equifax breach is a stark example—despite compliance with various regulations, a preventable vulnerability led to the compromise of 147 million consumer records, resulting in billions of dollars in settlements and regulatory fines.
Similarly, banks facing SWIFT-related cyber fraud attacks have demonstrated that compliance-focused security strategies can still leave critical gaps. The 2016 cyberattack on Bangladesh Bank, in which hackers exploited SWIFT payment protocols to steal $81 million, underscored the consequences of failing to integrate governance and security functions effectively.
A Governance-Driven Approach to Cybersecurity in Finance
A governance and assurance-driven cybersecurity strategy ensures alignment between security and compliance efforts while embedding risk intelligence into the organisation’s operational fabric. This approach enables financial institutions to move beyond periodic audits and regulatory checkbox exercises towards continuous risk monitoring and mitigation.
Key components of a governance-driven strategy include:
- Mapping compliance requirements with well know cybersecurity frameworks, to provide a structured approach since such frameworks provide a common language for the business processes
- Consolidating insights from financial risk models, fraud detection systems, and cybersecurity assessments ensures institutions can detect emerging threats in real time.
- Instead of relying on scheduled audits, financial institutions must implement automated compliance validation, reducing vulnerabilities and ensuring resilience between assessments.
- Leveraging AI-powered fraud detection, cyber threat intelligence, and predictive analytics enhances risk mitigation strategies, ensuring security measures remain proactive rather than reactive.
- Compliance itself should be viewed as a risk that must be managed the same as all other risks to the business. Business requirements are the drivers used to justify the entire risk management program
Various regulatory mandates are demanding greater accountability, transparency and cyber resilience from financial services organisations. And those organisations that fail to embed a governance-based risk model risk compliance failures, financial penalties, and reputational damage.
The future of cybersecurity in financial services
A unified cybersecurity platform that consolidates risk management, compliance, and threat intelligence within a single GRC-driven ecosystem is essential for financial institutions. Automated risk governance models powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning are able to streamline compliance, reduce human error and enhance fraud detection. Obrela’s MRC (Managed Risk & Controls) platform smoothly connects all major elements of Cybersecurity Security Management from framework establishment and maintenance to continuous risk monitoring and reviewing, delivering a robust platform specifically designed for Cybersecurity Security Governance and Compliance. MRC platform combines with MRC Services offer an umbrella of solutions that enable clients to effectively manage and orchestrate various aspects of cybersecurity such as governance, risk, compliance, and operations
By embedding cybersecurity governance across all financial operations, from payments infrastructure to trading platforms, banks and financial firms will get the ability to move beyond mere compliance checklists and toward true and sustainable operational resilience.
