It’s Midnight. Do You Know Where Your Customer Data Is?
What keeps you awake at night? If wondering whether your customer data is secure is near the top of your list of worries, then you’re in the majority. JP Morgan Chase, The City of New York, and now the IRS – data breaches are more common and harder to prevent by even the largest, most sophisticated organizations.
IT people who use to focus on how to share information are more concerned today about keeping it from being shared by those who would use it fraudulently. At least that’s what nearly 1700 IT professionals around the world confessed to the Ponemon Institute in a recent study, “The State of Data Security Intelligence.” Surveyed participants, the largest percentage of which, 17 percent, were from the financial services industry, identified as their biggest worry “not knowing the location of sensitive data” and therefore not being able to determine if that data is vulnerable to an attack or breach.The impact of a data breach can be crippling. Back in 2006 the Ponemon Institute estimated the average cost of a lost bank customer record at $182. But the total monetary cost could easily reach into the millions of dollars, according to Sterling Commerce, an AT&T provider of data protection services to banks.
Even if data security is compromised through a third party vendor, the bank ultimately owns responsibility for its customer data. So even a breach that doesn’t result in fraud would likely require the bank at a minimum to pay for credit monitoring for compromised customers. Beyond operational costs, the bank might incur civil penalties and insurance liabilities as well as regulatory penalties and fees. Consequences are intangible as well as tangible. A breach could be ruinous to the bank’s reputation, scaring off potential new customers and causing existing customers to move their accounts elsewhere.
To minimize the exposure of sensitive loan and customer data, MST offers the option of a locally hosted, browser-based solution for determining the allowance. The Loan Loss Analyzer (LLA) is the only automated ALLL solution on the market that can be housed on the bank’s server, keeping sensitive data inside the bank’s firewall. Data is not accessible to other applications nor institutions. Administered at the bank’s server level, the LLA looks and feels like a website to which only authorized users within the bank’s network have access.
Eliminating errors common to manual ALLL estimation, simplifying the allowance process amidst increasingly complex regulatory requirements, and securing sensitive data inside the bank’s firewall – in these and many ways, the LLA is helping bankers sleep a bit more soundly at night.
~By John Closs, MST
