Embedding Cybersecurity by Design

Introduction

Over the last year, the bank commenced a multiyear digital transformation to reimagine and modernize our core banking platforms enabling and better serving our customers and employees. This is a significant undertaking for a 160-year-old Bank and a unique opportunity to continue our vision of being the One Bank people most value and trust.

The core of the Bank’s focus is on building relationships to deliver on our vision. Cybersecurity is critical to protect the Bank but also a key element to enabling value and trust for our customers. As the Bank undergoes this platform modernization, we are taking a deliberate approach to cybersecurity. Embedding cybersecurity by design allows us to be a catalyst for digital transformation. The key question then is how should this be approached?

Building The Right Culture

Cybersecurity continues to get major attention and is rapidly becoming an organizational imperative for businesses worldwide. At the same time, demand for skilled cybersecurity professionals continues to climb, with estimates pushing into the several million unfilled roles over the next several years. In this unique operating environment of high demand, low supply, and strategic imperative, taking the right approach to cybersecurity is even more critical.

The cybersecurity leadership team at Fifth Third primarily focuses on crafting opportunities for career growth and business impact. This allows us to be an employer of choice and is a key differentiator to driving change. At the heart of this mission is to build trust in a digital world.

We do this in a few ways-

• Partnering with the business

With this approach we partner with the business in tandem to ensure alignment of cybersecurity objectives and to meet business needs. This enables us to take a broader view of organizational needs and allows our staff to influence business decisions.

• Build scalable processes

As a large, regulated organization, we have many controls and processes. With the digital transformation, many of these will continue to evolve. The dedicated focus of our cybersecurity team allows us to drive simplification efforts across the organization. This, in turn, has a cascading impact across the bank to make our users more secure and productive.

• Develop automated solutions

Cybersecurity teams run a significant number of technologies and platforms to protect our organization. Our team dedicates focus to ensuring these technologies are utilized and managed with automation that enables consistent and repeatable results. This facilitates scalable enterprise outcomes and the requirements of a large organization.

• Intelligence driven cyber defense

Effective cybersecurity requires a specific focus on what is happening in your environment and what adversaries are attempting to do. Cyber intelligence is the dedicated focus to connect dots in an actionable manner to defend the organization. Our cybersecurity team uses threat intelligence to drive the creation of innovative capabilities to detect and respond to attacks.

• Identity Centric Security

Your digital identity, or the digital persona is the primary way employees and customers interact with an organization. Reimagining identity with identity-centric security is critical for us as it allows us to directly deliver trust in the digital world for our employees and customers. This allows us to embed security capabilities down to the individual and to the systems they interact with. As the bank undergoes digital transformation, this approach spans across our people, devices, applications, processes, and data to catapult modern approaches to security.

Bank Impact of This Approach

It seems clear that cybersecurity will continue to be a major strategic imperative for organizations across the world. As dependence on technologies continues to grow to drive business objectives, reimagining how we approach cybersecurity can have a strategic impact beyond technologies.

This approach thinks beyond technology challenges to understand holistic business processes and capabilities. This allows us to use technology and cybersecurity as a driver to eliminate inefficiencies, simplify our capabilities, and catapult modernization efforts in order to better protect our customers and their data. This approach puts our people at the center of the opportunities to be solved.