TALKING

Social listening

Customers live digitally and share their experiences with everyone. For commercial entities like banks, this sharing may be with the brand in the form of direct feedback, or it may be with other consumers on social media. For a bank with millions of customers, it would be impractical to have employees trawl even the company’ s own feedback data in search of insights. LLMs, however, are very much up to the challenge.

produce initial drafts of deliverables such as quarterly performance summaries or market-outlook reports.

This alleviates the burden on finance professionals who need only fine-tune the commentary. The labour saved by Generative AI puts time back into the hands of innovative humans who can use it to strategize and create.

Integration of Generative AI

They can sift through surveys, reviews, and social pages rapidly. They can find connections and recurring themes, recognise sentiments, and tie comments back to specific products or product lines. And they do so without bias, ensuring more accurate insights. This is the kind of information businesses can use to improve offerings and delight customers.

Financial summaries

Documentation, when done manually, is one of the most time-consuming tasks in an employee’ s daily workload. Financial commentaries are orders of magnitude lengthier and more complex. But when Generative AI takes over data synthesis and analysis of trends, performance and risk, it can rapidly

The main challenge for organisations eager to avail themselves of these advantages will lie in how to securely integrate Generative AI into their workflows. The enterprise must take care during procurement to ensure the chosen AI partner can integrate Generative AI with full security, governance, and operational controls, so customers and regulators can both be satisfied with the result.

A finance team equipped with Generative AI will be a strategic leader within any organisation. The capability to lubricate the machinery of finance, and therefore of business, comes as standard. And when team members become comfortable with their AI colleague, the business will be setting standards of excellence for others to follow. p

Role of regulations in cybersecurity

Regulations heavily influence the financial sector’ s cybersecurity strategies, often focusing on risk management. However, while threats evolve quickly, regulations tend to lag, and take time to develop.

Traditional corporate security teams can no longer prevent breaches as swiftly as attackers compromise systems, and monitoring tools have limited ability to stop a threat. That is because the time it takes for attackers to compromise and exfiltrate data is now quicker than the time it takes for an organisation to remediate, which is typically 4 – 6 days.

With the average data breach now costing around $ 4.45 million, financial institutions need a proactive cybersecurity strategy, not one that is reactive to regulation alone, including investment in advanced technologies to quickly detect and neutralise threats.

Financial institutions should only view regulatory requirements as a foundational baseline, rather than a comprehensive basis for defence. Within the financial sector, more than any other, proactive, threat-based strategies are essential.

AI is reshaping business functions in financial services, enhancing the customer experience and operational efficiency, but it also introduces new security risks. Today, attackers are using AI for reconnaissance, social engineering, malicious code development and more. These tactics accelerate attacks, making them harder to combat with traditional cybersecurity measures.

Even within the security department it has become a double-edged sword, aiding both cybercriminals and defenders. While many organisations adopt AI to improve operations, the technology also expands attack surfaces, allowing cybercriminals to automate and scale attacks.

By consolidating security products and shifting to a platform approach, AI-driven cybersecurity solutions can be best utilised to help institutions detect and respond to threats in real time, protect data and be more agile in response to incoming regulation.

In order to put the right solutions in place, security teams first need trust and investment and that means taking the cyber challenge to the board. C-level leaders in the financial sector often underestimate their cyber-resilience and so effective communication from CISOs and CTOs about cybersecurity risks and investment needs is essential.

Haider Pasha, Chief Security Officer, Palo Alto Networks, EMEA and LATAM

32 INTELLIGENTCIO AFRICA www. intelligentcio. com