Brokered deposits are a popular way for well-capitalized banks to increase deposits—but they also come with additional regulatory scrutiny. As the industry pushes for more flexibility to make it easier to work with deposit brokers, bankers can help make their case with strong vendor management. Vendor management is a must for any third-party vendor, and […]

Risk management isn’t just for large institutions. The case can be made that it’s even more important for smaller financial institutions (FIs) to address risk management. Why? They are an attractive target for cyberattacks. Large FIs may hold the most data, but hackers also know they are likely to have sophisticated cybersecurity. As a result, […]

You’ve heard it before, and you’re going to hear it again: Financial institutions aren’t doing enough to ensure their contracts with third-party vendors sufficiently address business continuity and incident response. The most recent warning comes from the FDIC where examiners have observed gaps in financial institutions’ contracts with third-party technology service providers, according to an […]

Vendor cyber breaches are shockingly common. A study released by the Ponemon Institute in November revealed that 59 percent of respondents in the U.S. and U.K. report that a third party caused a data breach. That includes the 42 percent of organizations that experienced a vendor-related data breach in the past 12 months. Another 22 […]

Cybersecurity ratings have come a long way since they were first introduced. Today’s cybersecurity ratings are a guide for uncovering and addressing cybersecurity issues that need to be resolved before they are exploited. In a world where financial institutions have a multitude of vendors with access to sensitive information, ratings help identify third-party vendors that […]

Cyber criminals are growing increasingly clever. Just consider what happened to Tampa Bay Credit Union recently. Fraudsters played an elaborate game of connect-the-dots by figuring out the Bin number on the credit union’s debit cards and spoofing cards by connecting Bin numbers to members’ debit cards, reports SC Media. Thousands of cards had to be […]

Increased risk exposure from third-party providers, particularly fintechs, poses threats to the entire financial system, and banking regulatory agencies should have the ability to oversee them. That’s the message of two government reports published late last year by the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO). FSOC: Supervision Key to Reducing […]

People like to joke about the amorphous nature of “the cloud.” It’s neither here nor there but also everywhere. While the cloud may seem mysterious to the layperson, there shouldn’t be anything secretive about your third-party vendors’ cloud use. If your vendor is housing any of your client or sensitive data on the cloud, you […]

Concentration risk is most commonly associated with lending, particularly with commercial real estate lending. This remains true today, with the Government Accountability Office’s predictive models of CRE loan performance indicating that concentration risk in CRE lending has risen based on an increase of both bank CRE lending and CRE prices the past few years, according […]

A lot of banks and credit unions participate in Apple Pay. In fact, nearly 3,000 U.S. financial institutions do – up from 1,600 just two years ago. When Apple Pay was first being adopted, I wrote a blog post discussing the potential data security and transaction risks Apple Pay could pose to client data. There’s […]