Navigating Risk in Financial Services: A Modern Approach to Cyber Resilience

The current hyper-digital economy, heavily dependent on digital systems and information relies on the key foundational concept, “how securely and responsibly an institution handles data”.

As digital transformation accelerates in all interactions the key control for maintaining the ecosystem is to have an efficient cyber resilience program which covers critical aspects of data security, data availability and data privacy.

To stay ahead of evolving threats and increasing regulatory expectations, cyber resilience today demands a strategic reimagination of how we approach risk. This begins with three critical shifts:

1. Shift from Static Control Management to Intelligence Driven Risk Management

The tectonic shift required from how many controls are in place to about efficiently and swiftly we can detect, understand, and mitigate threats in the ecosystem. Static risk registers and reactive control should be enhanced to intuitive risk management supported by automation, behavioural analytics, and AI-assisted insights.

By moving from periodic assessments to real-time threat intelligence, financial institutions gain the capability to prioritize risk by business impact, not just compliance severity. This intelligence-led posture transforms risk from an operational burden into a

strategic asset.

2. Transition from Compliance Reporting to Continuous Compliance

The changing threat landscape has also triggered a change in the audit landscape and methodology insisting regulators to demand more than policy documentation; they want evidence of effectively functioning controls and continuous governance and oversight. Continuous compliance especially for key risks and metrics has become a fundamental ask from the management and regulators for decision making and measuring compliance.

Example:

A global investment firm uncovered a recurring gap in the operational effectiveness of its access control policy. Although the policy required quarterly reviews of privileged accounts, manual oversight and delayed audits often led to missed reviews and lingering elevated access. By implementing a continuous compliance platform, the firm automated control checks and real-time evidence collection. The platform flagged stale privileged accounts and non-compliant review cycles, prompting immediate remediation. This shift enabled the firm to move from passive policy enforcement to active, ongoing validation, closing effectiveness gaps and reinforcing control accountability across business units.

3. Implement Proactive and Strategic Resilience Planning

It’s time to evolve resilience planning from a traditional, defensive mindset into a strategic, scenario-driven approach. Business-led simulations, playbook-driven recovery strategies, and real-time orchestration are now essential to ensure continuity in the face of targeted attacks or systemic failures.

Resilience must not only address how fast the business can recover, but also how seamlessly it can adapt, reconfigure, and operate under stress without compromising customer trust or regulatory integrity.

The shift in cyber resilience has now been set in motion. Financial institutions are actively embedding resilience into the core of their risk, technology, and compliance operations.

Banks today have demonstrated a clear move toward a unified approach to risk, integrating cyber risk with enterprise risk functions to enable a consolidated view of exposure. This alignment ensures that incidents especially those impacting payment systems or digital customer channels are evaluated based on business impact, financial exposure, and reputational risk. It’s a shift from control execution to risk-informed decision-making.

In response to RBI’s Digital Payment Security guidelines, payment aggregators have moved beyond traditional, point-in-time controls. Many now operate with continuous vulnerability assessments, real-time endpoint telemetry, and automated logging pipelines significantly improving detection accuracy and reducing response latency.

Even mid-sized financial institutions are adopting cloud-native platforms with embedded risk scoring, compliance heatmaps, and audit-ready evidence management. This approach allows them to scale resilience without scaling operational overhead.

With the changes in the industry the message is clear that cyber resilience is shifting for reactive to proactive resilience with it being designed into systems, decisions, and third-party relationships. Cyber Resilience is moving from just being a compliance obligation to a strategic enabler.