Finance

The UK's financial watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), has revealed details of a data breach that took place last year.

The FCA says that personal details of people who had made complaints against the watchdog were exposed following the online publication of a response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Among the exposed information are the names and numbers of those who had lodged complaints.

Financial disruptor Revolut has managed to raise $500 million in a Series D funding round. The new funding sees the value of the digital banking platform rocketing to $5.5 billion, making it the UK's most valuable fintech startup, and one of the most valuable fintech firms in Europe.

The funding comes from a group of investors headed up by TCV (Technology Crossover Ventures) and effectively triples the value of Revolut when compared to its funding round in 2018. The cash injection will be used to expand its multi-currency operations both in Europe and on a global scale.

In the year to November 2019, 75 percent of all credential abuse attacks against the financial services industry targeted APIs directly, according to a new report.

The research from Akamai observed 85,422,079,109 credential abuse attacks. Nearly 20 percent, or 16,557,875,875, of these were against host names that were clearly identified as API endpoints. Of these, 473,518,955 attacked organizations in the financial services industry.

Visa has announced that it has agreed to purchase Plaid as part of a deal worth $5.3 billion. The acquisition values the fintech company at around double its valuation following a 2018 Series C funding round.

Plaid is behind financial services APIs used by the likes of Coinbase, Gemini, Venmo and Transferwise. Its software allows for easier sharing of financial details, making it simpler to connect services to bank accounts. Plaid says the acquisition will help it continue to "accelerate the success of the fintech ecosystem".

Financial services business tend to be attacked more than those in any other sector, but a new study finds that 75 percent of respondents in this industry are over confident in their data management practices.

A worrying 24 percent of respondents to Integris Software's 2019 FinServ Data Privacy Maturity Study only update their personal data inventory once a year. Even more concerning, 13 percent only inventory sensitive data when audited or in response to regulation requests.

According to a new report, more than 60 percent of all leaked records in 2019 were exposed by financial services organizations, despite only six percent of breaches affecting these organizations.

The 2019 Financial Breach Report from Bitglass says these figures are at least partially due to the Capital One breach, which compromised more than 100 million records.

Google next big venture appears to be banking. According to reports -- including from the Wall Street Journal -- the company is partnering with Citigroup bank and will start to offer checking accounts from next year.

The project is codenamed Cache and it will also see Google teaming up with credit unions to provide banking facilities to people in the US. But with widespread concern about Google's attitude to privacy, is there a market for banking services from the company?

Ever more of our financial transactions are being carried out online, but if you have accounts with more than one provider, keeping track of information can be a challenge both for businesses and individuals.

Formed in October 2018, the Financial Data Exchange (FDX) is committed to uniting the financial industry around a single, interoperable and royalty-free standard for consumers and businesses to access their financial data.

Revolut is coming to the US. The innovative fintech firm has teamed up with Mastercard, and plans to bring its extraordinarily useful multi-currency card to America.

The digital banking service has already enjoyed huge success in Europe through its existing partnerships with Mastercard and Visa. Revolut's particular strength lies in the ease with which money can be converted between currencies with not only no or very low fees but also at incredible exchange rates -- all accessible through a mobile app.

As we have seen in another report today, the financial sector remains a prime target for cybercriminals. Phishing attacks and credential stuffing are the two most common forms of attack used against the industry according to another report from Akamai.

In the six months between December 2018 and May 2019, nearly 200,000 phishing domains were discovered by the research and 50 percent of all unique organizations impacted are from the financial services sector.

Nearly 40 percent of financial services businesses are failing to implement data initiatives due to a lack of skills, with almost a third saying that their GDPR initiatives are failing, according to a new study.

The report produced by Vanson Bourne for analytics database company Exasol is based on responses from 500 IT and business decision makers, from enterprises in Germany and the UK.

Many organizations work with hundreds of third parties, creating new risks that must be actively managed. The financial industry, in particular, has a massive business ecosystem made up of legal organizations, accounting and human resources firms, management consulting and outsourcing firms, and information technology and software providers.

A new study into the financial services sector from security ratings company BitSight finds that 97 percent of respondents say cyber risk affecting third parties is a major issue.

A new report reveals widespread security inadequacies and protection failures among consumer financial applications.

The research for Arxan Technologies, carried out by Aite Group, says these vulnerabilities can lead to the exposure of source code, sensitive data stored in apps, access to back-end servers via APIs, and more.

In a world of evolving technologies and shifting demographics within the workforce, and within firms' customer bases, organizations need to rethink their approach to the adoption and oversight of electronic communications.

But a new study from data archiving specialist Smarsh shows that financial organizations are not keeping pace with their retention and supervision efforts -- particularly with a growing, younger workforce that relies on expanding, mobile-friendly channels, such as social media and text messaging.

2018 has seen nearly three times as many breaches at financial services organizations as there were in 2016, according to a new report.

The study by cloud access security broker Bitglass finds there have been 103 breaches in this year’s report compared to just 37 two years ago.