Article May 25, 2021 6 min read

Choosing a video banking platform that protects your customers' data

Thomas Edberg

May 25, 2021 6 min read

Thomas Edberg

The Covid-19 pandemic, combined with the cultural shift toward video communication and efforts to keep pace with modern banking trends, has created a recent widespread adoption of video conferencing for internal and customer users across the finance industry.

However, successful video conferencing in the financial sector is only possible if the video platform in place is reliable, easy to use, and, perhaps most importantly, secure.

In this article, you will learn about the value of security in video banking as IT security risks to the financial services industry continue to rise, and a newly dispersed workforce has further increased these threats.

Video banking and hybrid work
Data security in video banking
IT security challenges for banking platforms
Key banking data protection considerations
Video banking solutions

Video banking and hybrid work

As remote and hybrid work continue to become the “new normal,” it’s more critical than ever to prioritize security compliance and data handling when planning your organization’s long-term video banking solution.

Video banking is here to stay, but customers (and markets) demand data security

In a recent article in the Financial Brand, Greg McBride, CFO at Bankrate.com, forecasts that the dramatic shift in how bank branches are used will continue driving the growth of video banking over the next decade. Enabling bank employees to use video meetings for “in-person” customer interactions opens up great opportunities to boost customer retention and revenue, offer more personalized digital services, increase staff efficiency, and provide added flexibility for customers and employees.

However, you won’t see any of those benefits if your customers hesitate to use your video banking platform due to security and personal data privacy concerns or if a data breach creates market distrust in your organization.

In a customer experience survey published in a recent Gartner report, security was shown as a top priority for banking consumers. Keeping financial and personal data safe was reported as the most important value driver for consumer video banking adoption, beating out other factors in the survey by a large margin. In other words, if you want to maintain your customers’ trust and continued loyalty, the security of your video solution should be a primary consideration for your organization's IT decision-makers.

Increased IT security challenges as a result of Covid-19

In many ways, the financial services sector has been vulnerable to security threats for as long as the industry has had digital operations and services. But the Covid-19 pandemic made the security situation even more difficult. With branches and offices closed, banks have had to increasingly turn to remote work and virtual customer interactions, which means navigating uncharted territory when maintaining data security outside physical office premises.

At the beginning of the pandemic, many organizations deployed new cloud-based video conferencing solutions overnight in an effort to maintain business continuity and customer relationships. Employees are now scattered across various locations, potentially accessing corporate resources from unsecured networks. They often use a hodgepodge of devices and software platforms that don’t always meet compliance and security norms or were chosen hastily without proper due diligence on vendors and configurations.

While this rapid deployment was necessary as a short-term solution for maintaining communication flows with colleagues and customers, it’s usually not a secure or sustainable long-term solution. Banks and other financial institutions handle large amounts of sensitive personal data, both about the organization and their customers, and for many organizations still operating this way, it’s just a matter of time before there’s a security breach that becomes a crisis for the organization.

And, to make things even more worrisome, at the same time that organizations have become vulnerable due to their dispersed workforce, cybercriminals have increasingly sought to exploit this situation, with 70% of surveyed UK financial services firms suffering a successful cyber attack in 2020 and blaming pandemic-related conditions as the cause. This was revealed in a Ponemon Institute report commissioned by Keeper Security, which also showed that 41% of the surveyed firms felt remote workers were putting the business at risk of a major data breach.

The average cost of a data breach for the financial services industry is as much as $5.86 million, according to the Ponemon Institute’s 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report for IBM.

As workplace culture shifts and digitization of the industry continues, bank CIOs are now challenged with finding robust ways of ensuring adequate protection for video meeting data in an increasingly complex threat environment. With video banking here to stay, it’s time to think beyond quick fixes and, instead, focus on implementing a secure and future-proof solution.

Key considerations for data protection in video banking

The problem with many consumer-grade video meeting applications is that the Call Detail Records (CDR) data is stored in the cloud and often transmitted outside national borders. This is problematic for European banks’ adherence to GDPR, as it includes the transferring of personal data to customers, but it could also put your organization in breach of industry-specific regulations in the country where your organization is located. So how do you ensure data sovereignty, meet full regulation compliance, and maintain industry-standard protocols?

If you want to keep data out of the public cloud and under your organization’s control, your first thought will probably be an on-premise, self-hosted solution. That’s correct, of course, and it can be a good solution for many companies, but remember that a self-hosted option also requires significantly more dedicated maintenance work from your internal IT team. As financial organizations continue to expand their digital offerings to scale and evolve with the market's demands, a third option - a private cloud - can be the ideal future-proof solution.

Private clouds are only accessible to a select group of individuals and can only be accessed through a private internal network. Data stored and processed in private clouds is protected from exposure to third parties, and by choosing this deployment option, companies can take back control of their data while maintaining flexibility. Private clouds are easy to deploy and manage and offer security, scalability, and data sovereignty all at once, making this an ideal choice for financial organizations with video banking as part of their customer services.

See the following video about the benefits of Pexip Private Cloud:

Secure and flexible video banking with Pexip

Whether you’re looking to boost the security standards of your existing solution, are preparing for the new hybrid workforce, or haven’t used video banking before but are ready to take this next key step, Pexip can provide customized solutions that meet the unique needs of your team, services, workflows, and security compliance criteria.

Pexip offers:

Flexible deployment options, including self-hosted and Pexip Private Cloud
Interoperability, which can help bridge the gap between your in-office and remote workforce. With the encryption of your legacy devices, your team’s hybrid workflow will be both seamless and secure
User-facing features like PIN-protected meetings, one-time meeting links, and custom-branded meeting screens add extra layers of meeting security while also providing peace of mind for the customer
A security-first enterprise solution for video conferencing, which adheres to industry-standard security regulations and protocols

Learn more about how Pexip helps financial organizations build secure, trustworthy video solutions that are ready to meet the demands of modern banking.

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