How financial institutions can go beyond compliance to build stronger identity security and customer trust.
Financial services leaders are navigating a perfect storm: tighter regulations, fast-moving threats, and rising expectations for trust. On July 31, we hosted a timely conversation between two of our team members, Pravin Chavda, Practice Director, and Octavio Lopez, Solutions IAM Architect, to examine how identity security must evolve to keep pace.
The discussion set a clear premise: identity can’t be treated as a periodic compliance exercise. It has to operate as a continuous, posture-aware control plane. Our speakers explored how the CFPB Open Banking Rule, GLBA Safeguards, NYDFS, SOX, and PCI DSS are reshaping obligations across authentication, consent, and data sharing along with what operational changes are required to respond without adding friction for customers.
A central theme was consent and secure access in an open banking world. The speakers walked through practical approaches to granular consent, tokenized data sharing, and policy-driven API protection. Identity orchestration emerged as the connective layer that brings these controls together.
Modern threats received equal focus. Credential abuse, phishing, insider activity, and third-party compromise demand stronger signal collection and smarter decisions at runtime. The panel highlighted behavioral analytics and zero trust architectures as non-negotiables. The goal is to reduce the blast radius of any event while maintaining a friction-right user experience.
Architecture matters. Many institutions still run critical workloads on legacy systems while scaling cloud services and fintech integrations. The conversation tackled how to unify identity across legacy, cloud, and hybrid environments, ensuring privileged access is tightly controlled and third-party risks are minimized.
What Leaders Should Take Away
- Treat identity as an operating discipline. Build continuous validation into everyday processes, not just annual audits.
- Operationalize consent and data sharing. Use orchestration to enforce policy consistently across apps and APIs.
- Raise the security baseline. Behavioral analytics and adaptive authentication are now table stakes.
- Design for scale and change. Standardize app onboarding and align controls to each application’s risk profile to reduce access creep.
