Security Strategies for Smaller Banks
Aite Group's Knieff on How Community Banks Can Protect Small BusinessesCommunity banks and credit unions, which have limited resources, must find creative ways to help their small business customers bolster security, says Ben Knieff, senior analyst at financial services consultancy Aite Group.
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"Many of the smaller financial institutions don't have the tools and the resources, and in some cases, even the knowledge base to appropriately protect those small business clients," Knieff explains in a video interview at Information Security Media Group's 2015 Fraud Summit New York. "Those small business clients also don't have their own internal resources. They don't have their own internal IT department. They don't have the expertise in-house to protect themselves. So, we wind up in a situation where you've got an unprotected client and a financial institution that's doing everything they can, but they don't necessarily have all the pieces of the puzzle to actually protect those clients."
In this video interview, Knieff advises smaller banking institutions to:
- Implement dual authentication on mobile devices to prevent fraudulent transactions.
- Stress the importance of training to its small business customers to improve awareness and limit social engineering ploys; and
- Develop open lines of communication with their customers to help limit damage perpetrated by fraudsters.
At Aite Group, Knieff specializes in financial services fraud detection, including account-origination fraud, online fraud and ATM fraud, as well as money laundering, identity theft and other security challenges faced by regional and community banks. Before joining Aite, Knieff spent more than 15 years at the financial services firms FIS and Actimize, where he gained expertise in issues relating to financial services regulations.