The case for dynamic authorization in banking and finance

by Ask Martin on September 21, 2021

More than other organizations, banks, and financial institutions face the highest levels of scrutiny when it comes to how they protect critical assets and sensitive information.

At the same time, these institutions also face the same challenges others do in trying to modernize their infrastructure while concurrently maintaining the highest levels of service for their customers.

It’s with this backdrop that many of these organizations reach out to ask how they can implement a solution that ensures adherence to a growing number of global compliance regulations while also maintaining the transparency business continuity they require to stay competitive.

Adopting dynamic authorization addresses both of these challenges.

As I speak and work with customers worldwide, I’ve learned they’ve also leveraged dynamic authorization to proactively address issues associated with some common industry trends. In short, they view dynamic authorization as a key enabler for these high priority initiatives:

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Cloud migration

As much as cloud migration has been something everyone has talked about for years, it continues to be a critically important initiative for financial institutions.

They use cloud to streamline and strengthen their user and customer experiences for services including mobile banking with the goal of a frictionless experience.

Dynamic authorization applied to a cloud environment ensures a smooth, flexible consumer experience, ultimately bringing trust throughout the entire customer management cycle with improved data privacy and the ability to meet banking and data privacy regulations.

With more and more users and consumers forgoing face-to-face transactions, dynamic authorization enables institutions to enjoy the benefits associated with cloud migration without forsaking security and compliance.

User centricity

In the last two years we’ve seen a significant increase in customers embarking on initiatives designed to deliver higher levels of access delegation, personalized services and mobile applications.

Basic role and group access controls are no longer sufficient to support this level of personalization. These initiatives require authorization with a greater level of granularity and flexibility.

Fine-grained access control enables banks and financial institutions to create and enforce policies based on multiple attributes including location, time, and device to provide a personalized service to customers.

Zero Trust architecture

Zero Trust is everywhere and financial institutions see the benefits here, largely drive by the first two trends.

According to NIST, using context-aware technologies like attribute-based access control (ABAC) to establish a Zero Trust strategy is the best way to meet evolving security challenges both now and in the future.

With unlimited number of attributes, ABAC technologies (including dynamic authorization) support the principle of least privilege by enabling organizations to leverage additional context and attributes like risk score, device information, user location, and more, ensuring only authorized users have access to specific resources.

Shared services and decentralized policy authoring

For those institutions that have achieved higher degrees of authorization adoption and maturity, we see they look to move beyond project-based implementations and toward the provisioning of common centralized authorization platform services.

While enforcing top-level organizational policies, these initiatives place greater policy governance responsibility on product and application owners to develop and maintain their own access policies.

For more than ten years, Axiomatics has deployed solutions into numerous banking and finance customer environments.

Their use cases differ and range form controlling access to financial records and transactions through to accessing sensitive data and/or data subject to legislation and banking regulations.

The challenges faced by financial institutions are certainly not limited to the ones I’ve mentioned here.

For additional information on how Axiomatics can help your organization meet your IT goals both in the near and long term without compromising your security stance, please reach out to our team.