Identity theft main threat in Unified Communications Trend in Financial Services Sector

As financial services organisations exploit their pervasive information and communications technology (ICT) environments so as to realise the full cost saving and client retention benefits of unified communications, so identity theft becomes a more pressing issue.

Why? Because unified communications is not simply about having the full range of connectivity options for employees and clients. It’s about consciously converging all those options to make collaboration at all levels of the organisation and within the extended value chain benefit the both organisation and the client.

Unified communications is about a new way of thinking about human interaction.

It’s about removing the delays and miscommunication inherent in waiting until one can get hold of someone on the phone directly - or leaving a message and having the person on the other end get back to you only in several days’ time, or emailing documents back and forth to multiple parties and getting lost in the versions and track changes.

Far preferable to use unified communications facilities, such as Presence, to see that someone is available telephonically right now and calling that person right now to get an immediate decision made.

Or, if the person is not available now, being able to set the system to alert you when that person does become available – so that you can get an immediate decision.

Also, being able to quickly link in to a discussion a third person – or fifteen other people – via a conference call that also enables participants to see the document being discussed and make their changes live, shortens approval processes and, therefore, time to completion of a project or time to market of a product or service.

In other words, unified communications goes beyond helping financial services organisations meet the business survival criteria identified in the 2009 BMI-T survey, SA ICT Financial Service Vertical Sector, as: installing a standardised voice and data solution for all bank branch locations, minimising administrative expenses through remote management and configuration, and obtaining a network solution that can easily scale to support steady growth and new business applications when needed.

Unified communications enables a quantum leap in productivity and client relationship management – because it enables an unprecedented level of real-time collaboration.

However, with that capability comes the challenge of ensuring that the person with whom you think you are collaborating is, in fact, the right person and not some virtual personality on a phishing expedition or trading with the financial organisation’s information.

For the organisation to make sure of that, it must have security strategies and technologies in place not just for live transactions but for those times when an employee has left the organisation, is on leave, or is on assignment in another region.

All the data and authorisations relevant to that employee person have to be controlled or cleared off the system in such a way that someone else cannot impersonate the employee or take advantage of his or her data.

That requires security strategies focused on and geared to facilitating collaboration through unified communications while protecting the organisation, the customers, and the extended value chain from identity theft.

Yes, of course, as BMI-T points out, there are a number of areas of security that financial services organisations must have in place anyway. Without the basics in place, it’s impossible to do the more advanced kind of security made necessary by the advent of new technologies, especially the mobile ones, and the business models driven by them.

The basics are, at least, endpoint security and protection of mobility, security information management (SIM), security risk management, and anti-virus, anti-spam, and anti-spyware. Regulatory compliance, of course, is a given.

Over and above all that, however, there has to be an awareness, not just in the ICT department, but at board level, that unified communications is a strategic tool precisely because it enables collaboration. Securing that collaboration, therefore, secures your strategy – and the future competitiveness of your organisation.

Securing the collaboration also presents the organisation with the opportunity to re-architect, specifically, its mobility and video solutions now so as to be able to more fully take advantage of current unified communications technologies while positioning the organisation to add new technologies as they present themselves without having to confront the issue of identity theft again.

As always in technology, organisations that lay a secure groundwork for unified communications now will be the flexible, adaptable ones during the inevitable evolution of communications and business models.