National Bank of Fujairah
Image Credit: Supplied

The Covid-19 outbreak has expedited the digitisation movement at an unprecedented pace, and we have witnessed a massive shift from the physical world to the online space. The banking sector, which has been a pioneer in this transformation, is no exception. And while digital banking offers customers convenience and faster processing of financial transactions, it heightens vulnerabilities that banks spend years pre-empting and preparing for.

We have made relentless efforts to foster a culture whereby employees, partners and customers are fully aware and equipped to deal with potential cybersecurity threats.

- Vince Cook, CEO, National Bank of Fujairah

At National Bank of Fujairah (NBF), we have built a robust cybersecurity strategy that focuses on three main pillars: identity protection, data protection and culture. To protect the identity of our customers, we have deployed the most advanced authentication methods such as biometrics and facial recognition and will continue to evolve our techniques to maximise security. Our approach to data protection is steered by a cross-functional data governance forum, which is designed to ensure we manage data security, privacy, quality and overall performance in an effective way.

We have made relentless efforts to foster a culture whereby employees, partners and customers are fully aware and equipped to deal with potential cybersecurity threats. As part of bank’s cyber resiliency programme, we conduct various types of cyberattack simulations like the Red Team exercise, Tabletop Cyber Attack Simulations, Phishing simulations, among others to measure our cyber resiliency capabilities with the help of specialists. We use the learnings from these simulations to improve our cyber resiliency as well as inform and evolve the bank’s cybersecurity strategy. We also have specific KPI’s for some of these simulations and we can proudly say that for the phishing simulations we have observed a significant improvement in the user’s culture change towards cybersecurity.

Looking ahead, we will focus our efforts on strengthening our three cybersecurity pillars by frequently updating our proactive and reactive security controls and overseeing digital channel fraud management to safeguard new the technologies that continue to evolve.