SailPoint research highlights need for stronger identity security in financial services

The report found that while a growing number of financial services firms are prioritising identity security, attacks remain dangerously commonplace, with 93% of respondents reporting that they have experienced a breach within the past two years. 

The report includes a number of encouraging findings, including 100% of respondents indicating that identity security is either a relatively important, critical, or number one investment priority within the organisation. Furthermore, 56% of those surveyed indicated that their organisation has fully implemented an identity security programme, with 29% stating that their programme has been in place for at least two years. These numbers reflect the growing prioritisation of identity security across the financial services sector. 

The report also highlights the various identity security challenges financial services organisations face. Among respondents, 91% indicated that they have experienced challenges when it comes to adopting identity security, with the most common being flexibility in integration (38%), high configurability (35%), or being complicated to implement (32%). In addition, nearly all respondents (97%) agreed that their organisation’s ability to detect and prevent identity-related security breaches needs improvement. Despite those challenges, 100% of respondents reported experiencing benefits from their identity security solution, including the ability to connect the identity programme to horizontal applications (49%), cost and/or time savings within the IT and security teams (45%), and more control and visibility into users (44%). 

Matt Mills, President of Worldwide Field Operations for SailPoint, said: “The financial services industry deals with large amounts of sensitive data and personal identifiable information, making it a prime target for attackers.This makes strong identity security a necessity. The fact that over half of the surveyed financial services firms have fully implemented an identity security solution is a step in the right direction, but it’s clear that there is still room for improvement. Breaches have long been a fact of life in the financial sector, but implementing a strong identity security solution greatly reduces the potential damage that an attack can incur.” 

To read the “State of identity security 2023: A spotlight on financial services” report in its entirety, click here. 

To take a maturity assessment to see how far along your organisation is in its identity security journey.

Methodology

The insights in this report are based on a survey of 150 IT and IT security decision makers conducted in August and September 2022. Respondents were located across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, and Japan and were from organisations with 1,000 or more employees.