How is the financial sector ensuring resilience to cyber threats?

Did you ever think about the types of cyber risks that cause financial leaders to lose sleep?

Ransomware, credential compromise and advanced persistent threats — each is now assisted by machine learning (ML) and social engineering manipulation. Plus, cascading attacks down intertwined third-party supply chains—even breaching just one vendor can ruin a company (and its reputation).

One thing that lurks beneath the surface is technology debt. Modernization has become an imperative, yet one that is often deferred as organizations go forward, saddled with costly, insecure systems developed years ago.

Regulatory frameworks are tightening fast. Stronger governance and resilience testing is demanded, DORA, NIS2 in Europe and most recently the EU threat-led penetration testing standard (Regulation2025/1190). The Financial Stability Board is facilitating global convergence of incident reporting to protect financial stability.

Security leads have been insisting on zero‑trust as their architecture, continuous exposure management (CEM) for an understanding of when and where breaches can occur, AI powered threats detection to correlate vast sensor data in attempt to sense subtle hints of attacks however they are few if at all currently practicing this posture, enterprise-wide backup strategies that can enable fast recovery by any necessary means soon after the breach when it happens — not if!

Have banks finally started to prioritize cyber resilience as a core strategic mission, or are they still struggling to keep up with advancing threats?