A Sit-down With A FinTech Cyber Security Expert

Today we’re sitting down with Joe Haywood, a Technology Risk Specialist working with financial service organisations, to discuss everything data-orientated and how he sees the future of Analytics within the cyber security industry.

Joe has a huge passion for new and up & coming technology in the Fintech, Regtech and Insurtech spaces, and is predominantly focused on technology controls and how they can be implemented to manage key industry risks, he’s worked at many large firms within insurance, banking and investment, so we’re keen to get his thoughts!

So, Joe, do you think that utilising data analytics could make your job easier? Yes definitely… there are several areas that could benefit from the implementation of data analytics! The use of data tools would drastically increase the efficiency of the reviews we perform for our clients by allowing us to automate areas of our testing. We are seeing more and more data analytics being used across the industry as a whole and are in the process of utilising analytics with our clients to ensure a consistent and efficient approach for our testing methodology.

How would you theoretically implement predictive systems to improve Cyber Security? I think that predictive systems would most benefit the cyber security sector, by implementing a cyber tool that is loaded with common attack methods and exploitable variabilities from attackers, which would then sit on a network actively looking for these attack methods and variabilities to put a stop to any security breaches, and then alert the security teams at the organisation. Additionally, these predictive systems can identify common patterns and trends of how the network is used and the types of data sent across it, anything that is outside of these norm trends would be alerted, blocked or stopped to increase security of the organisations environment.

“This would allow us to tailor our approach or team capabilities to result in more successful business development opportunities.”

How would a bespoke analytics dashboard give you a competitive edge? Having access to fully customisable dashboards would allow us to give our clients a clear central place to view the overall progress of our engagements, with unique sections based on their specific requirements. This would especially be useful when we are performing large engagements across multiple business units, so the client would be able to view digestible breakdowns across multiple locations. 

Using data analytics, what patterns would you be most interested in finding out? I think the most beneficial patterns to analyse would be in our business development sector. It would be interesting to discover specifically the current array of our client base across the financial services industry, the sectors that we are most successful in winning bids and why we were unsuccessful in other sectors. These would be the key areas of interest to find patterns and trends. This would allow us to tailor our approach or team capabilities to result in more successful business development opportunities.

Off the shelf analytic solutions are becoming outdated and generic, how would you benefit internally from unique dashboards?  Having access to fully customisable and interactive dashboards would be much more useful than an off the shelf product as this would allow us to have exactly the type of view we are looking for, bespoke to our requirements and needs. We would be able to filter, include and exclude specific data to arrive at results in a much more simplistic, modern fashion. 

What would the ideal data visualisation dashboard look like in the world of financial technology? The most useful visualisations in FinTech Cyber Security would be key risk monitoring in a centralised view. This would allow for live tracking on security implementations, success rates for risk mitigation, and continuous anomalous tracking. This would be especially useful for real-time security monitoring on a live dashboard.

Our Thoughts As organisations in both private and public sectors start to rely more and more heavily on technology to control and manage vital infrastructure, this creates the potential for malicious users to wreak havoc on critical systems, so now more than ever investing in tools to protect these systems is vital so hopefully malware that causes out of the ordinary behaviour can be identified and mitigated against quickly to avoid issues. These tools could have proved invaluable against one of the most successful malware in history ‘Stuxnet’, and I am sure in the future it will aid in both the discovery of new malware as well as fighting back against infected hardware,