Podcast: Digital Identity Trust, Part 1 — Securing Digital Transformation

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Welcome to the first episode of our “Digital Identity Trust” podcast series. This week, our focus is fraud cybersecurity and digital transformation, and we’re joined by Rob Rendell, global client success leader for financial fraud prevention and tool set development at IBM. With more than a decade of experience in fraud prevention, strategy development and policymaking, Rendell has valuable advice to help empower companies as they embrace digital transformation.

A Mindset Shift in Fraud Prevention

Rendell contends that the push for digital transformation has resulted in a complete mindset shift. Previously, fraud prevention focused primarily on combating fraud sources and driving down total losses. Now, companies must balance the need for risk reduction against evolving customer expectations and the expanding functionality of cloud-enabled, always-connected apps and services.

For Rendell, fraud cybersecurity now requires risk managers to partner with product owners to collect more information about devices, consumers and behavior if they want to reduce total fraud risk. In a digital-first world, it’s no longer enough to limit the outcome of fraud — enterprises must leverage big data and interdepartmental partnerships to discover the source of fraud.

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3 Challenges for Fraud Cybersecurity

Rendell identifies three major challenges for companies in this new landscape:

• Digital identity — Are users who they say they are?
• Digital trust — Is the information provided by customers, applications and outside services accurate and reliable?
• Onboarding — When new users first join a network, how are they vetted? What data is collected and used to establish familiarity and comfort?

Improving fraud cybersecurity requires businesses to both identify and overcome critical barriers. For Rendell, these include legacy systems that must be ripped and replaced or upfit to deliver value, higher project volumes that revolve around faster money movement, and the need to deploy security controls as early in the development processes as possible.

Take a Holistic Approach to Digital Identity Trust

One important goal of digital transformation is to help deliver fraud defense that is both secure and seamless. Rendell’s advice is to start with a holistic look at all of the projects on the board. What’s the biggest priority? Which carries the most risk? It’s also critical to create consistent policies and ensure stakeholders are in agreement before diving into digital transformation.

Do you have what it takes to be a digital trust operative?

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