Hot off the press: Data quality is crucial

Original published in German by IT Finanzmagazin – find here. Translation provided by DeepL.com. Photos provided by Pixabay, Experian, Jochen Werne. Collage design by Canva

STRATEGY 23 January 2024

EBA deadline of 30 June: data quality will be decisive in the assessment of credit risks

Financial institutions are facing a significant change in the assessment of credit risks this year. Now comes 30 June: the deadline for new standards in credit risk assessment. Jochen Werne (CEO Experian DACH) is convinced that data quality will become the kingmaker in the credit risk market.

by Jochen Werne, CEO Experian DACH

Since 2021, financial service providers have been required to implement the supervisory priorities of the ECB and EBA. These priorities include the comprehensive improvement of credit risk management practices and the integration of new risk factors, particularly in the area of climate and the environment, into their risk management strategies. At the same time, the requirements for data management in the context of credit scoring are increasing. Artificial intelligence (AI) will play a key role here and banks will have to adapt to the new EU AI Act.


“By the deadline of 30 June 2024, large banks must have adapted their systems and infrastructures in accordance with the EBA Loan Origination and Monitoring Guidelines (EBA-GL LOM) for effective credit risk management and monitoring.”

This also includes closing data gaps. However, smaller, nationally supervised financial institutions must now also comply with these new guidelines, as additional elements of the 7th MaRisk amendment came into force on 1 January 2024, which are based on the EBA guidelines, among other things. Financial organisations must review their existing practices in 2024 and adapt their credit risk assessment standards accordingly. In future, credit assessment models will have to take much greater account of transparency, fairness and sustainability, particularly from an ESG perspective. The game changer for this is increasing their data quality.

All of this leads to five important changes:

1. Profitability strategies in a challenging market environment

In view of the weak economic momentum, the expected increase in non-performing loans and challenging margin developments, financial institutions must develop new growth strategies.

“Investments in technologies such as generative AI and forward-looking risk management are becoming increasingly important.”

Advanced data analytics support organisations in various phases of their customer lifecycle. Already in the application phase, high data quality enables a more efficient assessment of creditworthiness. In portfolio management, advanced data analysis helps to proactively manage risks and dynamically manage the credit portfolio. Advanced analytics and high data quality help to strengthen resilience to risks, including data-based early risk identification and an optimised dunning and collection process.

2. Digitalisation for resilience, including against novel risks

“Over the next 12 months, strengthening business resilience through automation and digitalisation will be key to responding to new risks such as AI, cyber threats and geopolitical tensions.”

These challenges not only affect the target customer landscape, but are also of great importance in the context of new ESG requirements. Due to their complexity and innovative nature, traditional approaches based on historical data cannot cope with these risks: Traditional approaches to data analysis and model preservation increasingly have to deal with slow regulatory processes on the one hand and a more dynamic macroeconomic environment and growing cyber risks on the other. In order to cope with this competitive situation, new strategies in the utilisation of all relevant data are urgently required, which place advanced analytics and the improvement of data quality at the centre.

3. PSD3, PSR and FIDA: Banks between risk and opportunity

Since the end of 2023, the EU Commission has been aiming to drive forward the “Consent Driven Economy” with new regulations such as PSD3 (Third Payment Services Directive), PSR (Payment Services Regulations) and FIDA (Access and Use of Financial Data) and to give consumers more opportunities to use the data available about them.”

As one of the players with the greatest wealth of data, this presents banks with a high risk in the face of new competitors. At the same time, however, it also offers them an opportunity to become a trusted partner for consumers. These regulations, which focus on the promotion of open banking services, greater control of data access and measures against online fraud, represent a starting point for financial institutions to think about the further use of transaction data. In addition to combating fraud, advanced analytics of transaction data, even taking into account all compliance requirements, opens up additional opportunities for interaction with end customers to improve the customer experience or the chance to monetise data.

4. Growth driver EU AI Act

“The EU AI Act will have a significant impact on the use of AI in the financial sector and further strengthen the financial sector’s technology focus.”

AI and machine learning (ML) will further automate decision-making processes in the future and strategic investments in this area will therefore become even more crucial for growth in the future. According to a study by Forrester Consulting commissioned by Experian, 60 per cent of German companies already take a similar view and have a comprehensive AI-based risk management programme in place. By using these technologies, credit and fraud risks can be assessed more precisely and efficiently, even in uncertain economic times. Companies that implement these developments are positioning themselves as pioneers in a rapidly developing, technology-driven financial sector: 78 per cent of the companies surveyed in the study in Germany also state that they are prioritising the use of further AI and ML applications.

5. Continuation of cloud migration in the financial world

Cloud integration remains a significant but unfinished transformation challenge in the world of finance.

“The ongoing implementation of continuous development and continuous improvement, particularly in the areas of business, analytics and IT, is becoming increasingly important.”

This includes identifying core business processes that will benefit significantly from cloud migration and defining clear priorities and objectives for the migration process. Cloud-based data analytics plays a central role in gaining valuable insights from customer behaviour, market trends and operational data to improve business processes and make more informed decisions.

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About the author: Jochen Werne has been CEO DACH at Experian since August 2023. Previously, he served as Managing Director at Prosegur Crypto and as Chief Development & Chief Visionary Officer at Prosegur, where he was responsible for the development and implementation of strategies in the areas of business development, innovation and international sales. Werne’s career includes significant leadership positions at Bankhaus August Lenz & Co. AG, Mediolanum Banking Group, where he served as Director and Authorised Representative and was instrumental in the company’s digital business transformation. His academic career includes a FinTech programme at the University of Oxford (2017-2018) and a Diploma in International Banking at Goethe University Frankfurt (1997-2000).

Jochen Werne – Chief Executive Officer Experian DACH

The Quantum Race

It was very inspiring to have the opportunity to participate in the workshop on responsible quantum technologies with some of the world’s most recognised experts in the field. Congratulations and thanks a lot to the organisation committee.

Please find details HERE

The second quantum revolution has been ongoing for more than two decades now and many countries around the globe have noticed the promises of these technologies. Just in the last decade, the number of publicly supported national initiatives grew from zero to more than 15, with globally more than 20 B€ of public investments allocated or planned. Both the number of new publications per year and patents granted on quantum technologies (QT) has also been climbing steadily for the last decade, so has been the number of start-ups being founded and established companies getting into the field. Finally, the field started receiving attention from private funding sources in recent years, which some have been calling the ‘quantum gold rush’. Within two decades, QT became a strong contender for a potential future industry from a topic that was mainly discussed in physics conferences.

All this rapid development triggered a sort of quantum ‘race’, where countries, companies, and institutions compete to become the first to achieve a checkpoint or to be the current best at some quantum benchmark. However, it is also noted by many that the real/transformative effects of QT on society will be in the long run. In this respect, we would like to initiate a discussion on responsibility and introduce QT as a noteworthy emerging topic for technology assessment (TA) studies.

This workshop aimed to be another step towards establishing connections between the QT and TA communities and to introduce some current discussions in the QT community to a new audience. It is organized as a collaboration between the QuTec project under KIT-ITAS, and the QUCATS Coordination and Support Action of the Quantum Flagship program. 

The conference program consisted of panels such as:

Panel on Responsible Education and Workforce Development for QT

  • Moderator: Araceli Venegas-Gomez (QURECA)
  • Panelists: Tatjana Wilk (MCQST), Maria Luisa Chiofalo (University of Pisa), İlke Ercan (TU Delft)

Panel on RRI and Ethics in QT

  • Moderator: Pieter Vermaas (TU Delft)
  • Panelists: Oxana Mishina (CNR-INO), Carolyn Ten Holter (Oxford), Douglas K. R. Robinson (CNRS), Robert Whitney (Université Grenoble Alpes)

Panel: How to think responsibly on the geopolitics of QT?

  • Moderator: Astrid Bötticher (University of Jena)
  • Speakers: Pieter Vermaas (TU Delft), Matthias C. Kettemann (IQEL, University of Innsbruck/HIIG), Mira L. Wolf-Bauwens  (IBM Research Europe)

Keynote: Analog Battlefields and Cyberwarfare: Risk & Opportunities in a Changing World

Until recently, most of us in today´s modern societies had had the privilege of assuming that a “real” war is a relics of a bygone era. This has changed. War in Europe is real and Cyberwarfare has become an asymmetric battlefield aiming at destabilizing whole economies and societies. In his keynote, Jochen Werne will lead you through historical analogies and share his thoughts with you on what soon might be a new reality and how you should prepare.

Kuppinger Cole – Cybersecurity Leadership Summit 2022

Hybrid Event

November 08 – 10, 2022

in Berlin, Germany & Online

Keynote Session by Jochen Werne

Wednesday, November 09, 2022 16:20—16:40

Location: Historic Kassenhalle

gi-Geldinstitute Expert Talk: How banks keep track of IT vulnerabilities

An article by Stefanie Walter, Editor | 01.03.2022 – translated with DeepL.com – Original in German available HERE

Expert Panel: Christian Meusel, Berliner Volksbank – Gerrit von der Hardt, Targobank – Thorsten Demski, Volksbank Bielefeld-Gütersloh – Andreas Meyer, Union IT Services DZ Bank Group – Jochen Werne, Prosegur – Marion Gratenberg, Targobank

The rapidly advancing technological transformation in the banking sector also brings problems. Instead of leading to increased security, labour savings and customer friendliness, different applications can also bring performance problems and even failures.

This must be recognised and averted in good time. Application performance management, performance engineering, software intelligence, overservability or process mining are the new buzzwords here. A holistic overview of all applications is helpful in resolving weaknesses and freeing up capacities for innovations in the business. In the gi-Geldinstitute roundtable discussion, this topic will be examined by experts.

Meusel: As a bank, we must first and foremost provide services for our clients. They are our main drivers. We in the operational organisation are therefore currently investing intensively in usability and direct availability in particular.

Demski: We want to avoid media discontinuities and streamline and improve process transitions in individual departments. The work on process improvement has accelerated a bit due to the pandemic. But it is a fundamental issue that we are dealing with in the context of digitalisation. Our last project focused on the speed of the credit processes. Our goal is not only to bring about decisions quickly, but also to ensure that they are as error-free as possible.

Gratenberg: We are concerned with making processes faster, but also more efficient from the customer’s point of view. In the last two years, we have invested a lot of time and analysis in the automation and optimisation of existing customer processes. An agile squad was also founded for this purpose. In the squad, we analyse where there is further potential to optimise and automate processes.

Werne: The goal of our process automation is to be as customer-friendly as possible. In Germany, we provide about 50 per cent of the total cash logistics. We thus guarantee the cash supply of the population and secure the liquidity cycle of companies, credit institutions and municipalities. In our cooperation with the banks, we want to drive the transformation. In our group, we are driving the optimisation of the IT outsourcing processes of the entire cash management and projects such as crypto custody. With Prosegur Crypto, we have launched a solution for the custody and management of digital assets that works automatically without an internet connection to achieve maximum protection against cyber attacks.

Meyer: Union Investment has two good reasons to optimise processes today – increasing process cost efficiency and regulatory law. As part of regulatory audits, we are required as one of the leading German asset managers to produce a business process map as part of the written order. I like the result: by using modern process intelligence tools, we recognise process weaknesses that need to be optimised. At the same time, we produce process models required by banking supervisory law. The auditing company PricewaterhouseCoopers confirmed an availability of 99 percent (2021) for the 170 applications used in the investment process. As part of the Genossenschaftliche FinanzGruppe (Cooperative Financial Network), we are the expert for the asset management of 4.8 million private and institutional investors with more than 400 billion euros in assets under management. We thus provide the IT required for this to more than 1,100 internal Union users with high availability.

Diener: In my role at Atruvia, the digitalisation partner of the Genossenschaftliche FinanzGruppe, I am responsible for measuring and analysing performance data for around 820 affiliated Volks- und Raiffeisenbanken. Basically, you have to distinguish between two topics in process optimisation: the business management part and the technical part.

When I think back to the early days of my working life in the early 80s, you would enter a short code into the old IBM terminals to support your work and be happy to receive an answer milliseconds later. Over the decades, many things have changed massively here. Business and technical performance moved closer together. IT has become a central core of everyday work and an essential part of overall process optimisation. In addition to dealing with speed, response times or simply checking whether systems are available, more emphasis is now placed on user experience and user behaviour. How is the customer, what are they doing, where are they having problems getting on in the application?

Von der Hardt: Challenges arise above all with very long process routes via different interfaces with channel breaks. Then you have to assemble information from the most diverse systems, databases or process areas. Because it is difficult to optimise something with a sixty percent view without knowing what the one hundred percent end-to-end customer view looks like. The goal is not to think in small puzzle pieces, but to have the entire customer journey in mind.

Werne: In the pandemic, our process management faces the additional challenge that, for example, retailers or bank branches that we supply with cash close here today and reopen somewhere else tomorrow. Against the backdrop of our current modernisation programme, we are also moving everything to the cloud. Since we operate globally, coordination between the different countries and standardisation play an additional role.

Von der Hardt: Challenges arise especially with very long process paths via different interfaces with channel breaks. Then you have to bring together information from the most diverse systems, databases or process areas. Because it is difficult to optimise something with a sixty percent view without knowing what the one hundred percent end-to-end customer view looks like. The goal is not to think in small puzzle pieces, but to have the entire customer journey in mind.

Werne: In the pandemic, our process management faces the additional challenge that, for example, retailers or bank branches that we supply with cash close here today and reopen somewhere else tomorrow. Against the backdrop of our current modernisation programme, we are also moving everything to the cloud. Since we operate globally, coordination between the different countries and standardisation play an additional role.

Meusel: The back office is an extreme driver of efficiency potential. With consistent optimisations and consolidations, we have been able to significantly reduce the resources tied up in recent years, not only through Atruvia’s solutions, but also through the broad use of technical innovations from other partners in the area of automation. Nevertheless, we still see topics with great potential, for example in the passive market succession, keyword probate, garnishment processing and other payment transaction services. As is well known, the active back office is currently experiencing high growth in the lending business. At the same time, the margins are melting away. We must therefore continue to look very intensively at how the balancing act of resource optimisation and business growth can be made possible, for example by means of process management. Here, of course, we use the analysis possibilities of Atruvia at our process times and try to achieve the necessary benchmarks through continuous process development.

Demski: We have also started in the back office. In the new year, we will take another look at customer service in the process analysis. This is where we can make the most profit. The procedure is first of all a precise recording of the processes and their interfaces. Based on this, we then evaluate which optimisation and/or automation steps make sense. Examples of automation for us are the processing of estates and processes related to online banking.

Von der Hardt: Targobank belongs to the cooperative Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale Group from France. We are a retail and commercial bank with a focus on financing. Our process optimisation relates to these core processes. With Targo Dienstleistung we have a high-performance customer centre in Duisburg, which emerged from an industrialisation initiative at the end of the 1990s. Targobank has more than 20 years of expertise in digitalisation and process automation. It benefits from a large IT service provider and sees itself well equipped for the future in the highly competitive financial services market.

Gratenberg: In existing customer management, for example, we have automated large parts of the account closure process. This has been working very well for us for over a year now.

Werne: With regard to cash, the banking world has been in a transformation process for quite some time. Various credit institutions are already completely outsourcing their cash management for process optimisation and cost reasons. With smart machines, which Prosegur installs at its customers’ premises, cash can be disposed of directly and credited on the same day. The smart infrastructure, including dynamic monitoring and forecasting, optimises cash logistics and reduces costs.

Meyer: We already very successfully implemented a group-wide digitalisation initiative in the period from 2007 to 2010. Together with the central institutions of the DZ

Bank Group, more than 18 custodian banks and almost 90 securities trading houses, we were able to achieve a dark processing rate of 95 percent for transaction management and accounting across all countries and locations – both areas where the factors of mass and standard processing matched. Challenging in this context was the unification of message standards in the networks for financial transactions such as SWIFT and FIX and the first use of machine learning-based applications for the processing of still paper-based bookings. Today, the focus is on examining the use of AI in the context of feasibility and profitability considerations and thus realising further efficiency potential.

Diener: Processes are organised very differently at banks. We see our task in providing tools with which our customers can map, optimise and monitor the processes. It is no longer enough to look at individual use cases, from the click to the information expected by the customer on the screen. Business processes are viewed as a whole. The question is, what can be automated? Of course, this always takes into account the regulatory framework. A lot has happened in recent years in terms of technical performance. New technologies such as virtualisation, containerisation, self-healing systems – systems that manage themselves – have taken hold. The processing of a request in the data centre has become more complex and dynamic. It is important to make these new possibilities tangible for the customer and to support him in process optimisation.

Von der Hardt: There are cross-departmental and cross-bank teams/squads both in operational process management and in process optimisation initiatives. Especially in the case of RPA automation, departments and IT work together across the board.

Demski: We now have a fixed, very broad-based team. Among them are colleagues from organisational development who have always been involved in process management. We recruited the RPA team from this group and supplemented it with colleagues from IT and technology. They are then joined by experts from the specialist departments of the processes concerned. Together, they take a close look at the process side, analyse what can be automated and then enter into the development. The procedure is rather iterative in the sense of agility. A first version of an automated process does not necessarily have to cover 100 per cent of all cases. The best way for the developers to determine the greatest benefit is to work together with the departments.

Meusel: It’s always about giving a voice to as many people as possible who are ultimately users of process flows and results. It is important for us to find the right degree of participation so that we don’t get lost in too broad a grassroots democratic process in the further development. It is clearly about quality, about the return of investment, how much time I have to invest to improve the processes and what the actual effect is. For example, we have defined clear guard rails with the automation team for RPA and OCR solutions. In addition, there is always a comparison with the strategic goals. Often we have to fulfil various parameters with scarce human resources. In addition to involving the right people, we want to make the whole process as transparent as possible in order to make decisions understandable. We work very collaboratively, instead of putting every evaluation on the table and saying this is how we do it now.

Meyer: We have always carried out major changes as part of a project portfolio in cooperation between IT and the business department. We always look at the expenditure plus follow-up costs/benefits over five years. Based on this, we have a ranking and allocate resources to the projects accordingly. We don’t tackle every sub-process that could be automated because it simply doesn’t pay off.

Meusel: We always have evaluation options for our essential applications. What is challenging, however, is the networking and visualisation of the individual systems and analyses. The right degree of considered systems and subsystems plays an important role here. There are certainly promising offers on the market here. Since process mining is an important field for us, we are already in contact with service providers. But our discussions so far have also shown that good advice is expensive.

Werne: Despite several analysis tools that we use, it is sometimes not so easy to manage performance engineering in connection with different systems so that they are scalable and comparable. We haven’t yet found the egg-laughing lizard, where you just click and then know exactly what brings what performance. I doubt that it will ever exist in the level of detail that the theory implies. Do we have an overall view? The answer is, of course, yes. It’s not just banks that need to have it, but all companies with critical infrastructures. And not just because the regulator expects it. With new processes being introduced almost daily, the biggest challenge is to integrate them perfectly in order to continue to perform as usual.

Meyer: The use of such tools with regard to the IT infrastructure is carried out by our IT providers. At Union Investment itself, we successfully use such tools to analyse business processes. We can now load the data required for the analysis from the underlying applications into a process intelligence tool and systematically identify throughput times and routes, quantity structures, manual processing steps and their process effort. Because today almost every processing step leaves a digital footprint in the databases – and the tool generates the entire process model almost independently.

Diener: We have initiated many things in recent years: On the one hand, from a pure tool perspective, but also organisationally. System and application monitoring were to be merged, the entire monitoring process was to be put on a new footing. In particular, we invested in a comprehensive solution from Dynatrace. Their software intelligence platform uses a proprietary form of artificial intelligence to clearly visualise and monitor applications, microservices, container orchestration platforms and IT infrastructures, and offers automated problem detection. Analyses under a highly dynamic platform, such as Openshift, can only be performed in an automated way.

We want one hundred per cent visibility across all 50,000 systems we currently have in use in order to detect faults in advance. With the dynamics of communication between the technologies, it is no longer possible to say exactly which components are used for an individual communication. That’s why it’s so important to have this monitored via AI and to have it signal us when there are deviations from the norm that we need to take action or use automatisms from the outset to heal it accordingly.

Von der Hardt: Our process team has to identify very precisely where the weak points are in the overall process. We don’t yet use any special analysis tools from process mining for this. Personally, I think we first need a general streamlining of some processes. We are so busy changing processes that we no longer have time to optimise them significantly. We are constantly complicating them with new regulatory requirements.

Gratenberg: We can say that we have significantly fewer complaints and improved customer ratings with processes that are very standardised and automated. There are different degrees of automation. Partly, employees are involved in the processes if they are very complex. After reading out customer letters, for example, very different types of processing can become necessary, some of which still require human intervention. In addition to reducing the workload and making it error-free, there are of course still challenges with automation that are just a little different than before. If systems fail, a robot cannot work. An employee can still use a workaround. But there are always solutions. The processing by the robot could be postponed, depending on the urgency. It may also be possible to use a replacement robot, with the help of another licence.

How can performance engineering help to increase safety?

Diener: When customers report faults, we have to identify very quickly whether it is an isolated incident or a large-scale problem. Furthermore, in the past it was often difficult to recognise whether a system was the cause of a malfunction or was only suffering from a malfunction of a different origin. However, the central goal is to detect malfunctions or weaknesses preventively. In 2018, we had over 60 monitoring tools. With the Dynatrace platform, we now have a holistic performance data warehouse as a central component of our monitoring strategy. The number of tools has been reduced through consolidation. When a malfunction is reported, we can thus quickly determine which groups of users and exact functions it affects. We are able to quickly narrow down possible causes in order to fix the problem permanently. Incidents are specifically forwarded to the person who can solve them.

Meyer: Around 500 servers are operated for us in the data centres of our IT provider Atruvia for about 170 applications. These are permanently monitored using more than 20,000 measuring points. If a fan fails somewhere and a server gets too warm, expected data transfers do not take place and the like, the responsible application managers or the Atruvia control centre are informed immediately. Our service-oriented organisation has regulated standard processes for this. In such cases, incident or problem management is immediately active. Depending on the type of fault, either at Atruvia and/or at Union IT Service.

Meusel: The smaller or more individual a bank is, the more challenging it is to have its own process engineering. We are grateful that we work closely with Atruvia on this. When it comes to regulatory requirements, innovations, availability and performance monitoring, we can handle the complexity much better together with our central service providers. Often, our internal control centre can be quickly provided with centralised information and focus on communication with customers and employees. The central lever of Performance Engineering is the reduction of own applications and their monitoring.

Demski: We largely rely on Atruvia for the IT infrastructure and thus naturally benefit directly or indirectly from their monitoring systems. At the same time, we also operate our own monitoring for critical parameters of the decentralised or self-operated systems. In addition to the short-term disruptions already mentioned, the measured values are of course also indications of the utilisation and performance of systems and possible problems, for example, the runtimes for data backups or loading processes in the nightly maintenance windows provide information.

Do you have a concrete example from practice for vulnerability management?

Von der Hardt: Sometimes we first hear from the customer that we have a problem. If there is one, the customer looks for a way. Then you realise how many contact channels you have, some of which were not intended for this purpose. IT problems can usually be found and solved quickly. It becomes more difficult with failures of other companies. External business failures during the Corona period or the insolvency of a travel provider are examples here, where many customers with personal and financial concerns contact you via several channels and payment processes have to be checked at short notice. Then speed and good networking of the information channels within the company as well as to other third-party service providers is crucial. We still have homework to do here. We have to ensure the flow of information around the customer in such a way that we can give him satisfactory feedback at short notice.

Meyer: One example was the critical vulnerability called Log4Shell in the widely used Java logging library Log4j, which became known at the beginning of December. Through this vulnerability, attackers were able to execute arbitrary code. Together with our IT provider, we deployed crisis teams, used vulnerability scanning tools immediately and effectively, and where necessary, applied the appropriate security patches within a very short time.

Bank Blog Crypto

Bank Blog Publication: WHERE BITCOINS MEET HIGH SECURITY FACILITIES

State-of-the-art crypto custody

by JOCHEN WERNE

Original published in German at DER-BANK-BLOG. Please click HERE Translation created with DeepL.com

14 February 2022

Digital assets are as safe as their encryption? Unfortunately not. After all, the dangers do not only come from hackers. Security must be thought of more broadly, as examples of state-of-the-art crypto custody solutions show.

The protection of crypto assets can only be guaranteed if there is a clear awareness of the dangers. Attacks on digital assets such as cryptocurrencies or asstes no longer end with the numerous attack vectors of cyberattacks, but unfortunately already extend to the use of physical force against their owners. It is therefore important to raise awareness of possible dangers, as shown by examples of the state of today’s state-of-the-art crypto custody solutions.

According to Investing.com, the total number of cryptocurrencies as of 12 December 2021 is 9,004 with a total market capitalisation of US$2.24 trillion. After Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, Litecoin and co, the Libra Coin initiated by Facebook received unprecedented media attention, triggered by the announcement of the project alone. And the emotionality and sharpness with which the discussion was conducted shows how seriously the topic is taken internationally at the state level. It is about reputation, influence, control, responsibility and only in the last instance about technology. And for every investor, it is first and foremost about protecting his assets.

The right sense of danger

In the future, protecting our assets will not just mean keeping our wallet in the deepest pocket of our jacket or handbag or turning the key to our flat twice in the lock. In the future, we will have invested part of the fruits of our labour, our fortunes, in crypto investments and cryptocurrencies. This part of our wealth needs to be kept safe, and we need to understand exactly where and how. This requires that we understand the risks. The sense of danger must therefore adapt, as must the lure of the new opportunities. For this, it is of utmost importance to understand the real dangers and to take appropriate protective measures.

As yet, however, this sense does not seem to be all that pronounced. According to Slowmist Hacked , which specialises in aggregating information on detected attacks on blockchain projects, apps and tokens, the total amount of crypto assets stolen in 122 different attacks in 2020 is $3.78 billion. Even though the evaluation is based on the Bitcoin peaks of January 2021, it clearly shows the importance of greater efficiency in security.

In comparison, only 1.63 billion US dollars were captured in the ten largest bank robberies of all time. Considering that the largest robbery took place when dictator Saddam Hussein ordered his son Qusay to withdraw nearly US$1 billion from Iraq’s central bank with a handwritten note, and the tenth largest robbery netted the perpetrators just US$18.9 million, crypto-cybercrime has become an extremely lucrative business.

Crypto custody: Do hot and cold wallets offer sufficient security?

The famous military scientist Carl von Clausewitz argued in the early 19th century: “An army on the defensive, without fortifications, has a hundred vulnerable points; it is a body without armour”. “We must always retain sufficient forces beyond the garrisons to be a match for the enemy in the open field, unless we can rely on the arrival of an ally to relieve our fortresses and free our army.” In cryptocurrencies, the wallet is the fortress and the blockchain – the distributed ledger – is the army in the open field. It is the job of modern crypto custodians – as guardians of their clients’ assets – to ask themselves daily what additional measures can be taken to best protect cryptocurrencies and crypto assets.

Crypto custody solutions typically involve a combination of hot storage or crypto custody that is connected to the internet and cold storage or crypto custody that is not. Rakesh Sharma comments on Investopia, “Both types of storage have advantages and disadvantages. For example, hot storage is connected to the internet and therefore offers better liquidity. But hot storage options can be vulnerable to hacks due to online presence. Cold storage solutions offer more security. However, it can be difficult to generate liquidity from crypto holdings in the short term because they are offline. Vaulting is a combination of both types of cryptocurrency custody solutions, where the majority of funds are stored offline and can only be accessed with a private key.”

The risk of becoming a victim of physical violence in private crypto custody

The risk of theft of crypto assets is no longer solely about digital robbery in cyberattacks and hacks. Physical violence against the owner of crypto assets or threats to family members is already sadly present. In November 2021, for example, the American co-founder of Tuenti, once billed as the Spanish Facebook, Zaryn Dentzel, was the victim of such an attack in his private Madrid flat.

Dentzel stated on record that the gangsters beat him and stabbed him in the chest with a knife while shooting him several times with a Taser.

Thus it becomes clear that the protection of crypto-assets must also go hand in hand with the fact that a perpetrator who is prepared to use physical force understands in advance that his alleged victim does not readily have power of disposal over his total crypto-assets. Cold storage not at home, but in a cold space, for example a high-security facility, can provide the necessary protection.

State of the art crypto storage meets high security facilities

In July 2021, Prosegur Crypto – the crypto custody subsidiary of Prosegur, one of the largest security companies in the world – announced the creation of the world’s first “digital asset custody bunker”. The consistent combination of a physically and digitally inaccessible environment here is unique to date.

In collaboration with cybersecurity company GK8, Prosegur Crypto brings together all the infrastructure, facilities, technologies and security protocols required to minimise all risk areas identified in the digital asset custody chain.

The solution consists of state-of-the-art cyber security systems provided by GK8’s patented technology and the highest level of a military-grade secured protection environment. It is based on a “360° inaccessibility” approach, mapping over 100 protection measures into 6 integrated layers of security. This ensures the highest possible protection against physical and cyber attacks.

The HSM (hardware security module, a device that generates, stores and protects cryptographic keys) is housed in a military grade briefcase within the high security vault. This vault is only accessible to a limited number of people who manage the data manually and offline. Staff have restricted access to the information they handle to avoid any risk of internal theft and work from a secure facility where there is no risk of physical attack, copying or theft of systems or passwords. In the event of an unauthorised attempt to access the HSM, its contents are permanently deleted. Immediately, a recovery plan is activated, including a protocol for recovering private keys using seeds located in various other vaults.

The module is connected to an MPC (Multi-party Computation) system, which provides a fast signature process on a state-of-the-art computer network and generates transactions on the blockchain without a direct internet connection. This minimises the possibility of fraudulent access and eliminates any potential vector for cyber attacks. These system features are patented and represent a highly differentiated offering in the market.

Plea for openness: danger recognised – danger averted

The analysis shows that from Clausewitz to the latest developments in cyber security and crypto-custody, the security perspective has hardly changed. The more you rely on a single system or fortress, the more vulnerable you are. It’s all about layered security, which makes it time-consuming and very costly for attackers to get what they desperately want.

We are still only at the beginning of a new era for our monetary systems. An era driven by technology in which it is increasingly important for every actor to develop a good understanding of it in order to build sustainable ones. Technology has never been right or wrong, only the way we humans use it can make it so.

New technologies offer the opportunity to make our world more prosperous for all – let’s use it!

Publication: The nature of society: Are certain cultures less predisposed to cyberthreats than others?

An examination using the example of Germany

Author: Jochen Werne

Published: Werne, Jochen (2019, December 1). The nature of society: Are certain cultures less predisposed to cyberthreats than others? An examination using the example of Germany. In the Cyber Security: A Peer-Reviewed Journal, Volume 3, Issue 2.

ABSTRACT

Successful ransomware attacks and thefts of data and passwords have unequivocally demonstrated that technical defensive measures are to be considered as merely basic moves in the protection against cyberattacks, and that security concepts, if to be effective, must take ever greater account of the human factor. Several examples prove that attack vectors which belong to the area of ‘social engineering’ are menacingly successful. Employees of enterprises, especially SMEs, frequently underestimate their importance when assessing security risks and the defence against them. As a consequence of these findings, a company-wide risk management should respect cultural and psychological peculiarities. Another promising approach are AI-based concepts, both as a technical defence against cyberthreats and in respect of processes specific to the company, as well as culture-specific characteristics of its employees. Both approaches are based on understanding human behaviour in its sociocultural context. Within the scope of this paper, this cultural aspect of cyber security is examined with regard to whether certain cultures may be less predisposed to cyberthreats than others. This is analysed using the example of Germany and also considers the question whether more or less authoritarian company cultures play a role in this context. How can phenomena such as German angst and similar cultural peculiarities be adequately taken into account? The remarks are mainly targeted at an audience which is concerned with organisational and technical countermeasures again cyberthreats. They focus on the importance of incorporating findings from psychology and social sciences when designing and realising such measures.

Author’s Biography

Jochen Werne is the Chief Development and Chief Visionary Officer (CDO/CVO) and executive committee member of PROSEGUR Cash Services Germany Ltd. Prior to that he was director and authorised officer of the Bankhaus August Lenz & Co. AG. Jochen is also member of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research Initiative ‘Learning Systems’ — a platform for artificial intelligence, member of the expert board of Management Circle, as well as a member of one of the most important think tanks worldwide: Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Jochen is a keynote speaker at various banking, innovation and executive conferences as well as an author and co-author of several textbooks and professional articles.

ABOUT Cyber Security: A Peer-Reviewed Journal

Cyber Security is the major peer-reviewed journal publishing in-depth articles and case studies written by and for cyber security professionals.  It showcases the latest thinking and best practices in cyber security, cyber resilience, cyber crime and cyber warfare, drawing on practical experience in national critical infrastructure, government, corporate, finance, military and not-for-profit sectors.

Each quarterly 100-page issue analyses significant current and emerging cyber security threats and the latest strategies, techniques and technologies available to detect, manage and react to them, helping to uncover potential weaknesses in your current systems which could be open to attack. Its detailed articles and case studies – all of which are peer-reviewed by an Editorial Board of leading cyber security experts – provide in-depth, actionable advice and ‘lessons learned’ from fellow professionals, showing how cyber security programmes have been specified, designed, implemented, tested and updated in their organisations, as well as how data breaches and exercises have been managed in practice.

Cyber Security does not publish advertorial or advertising but rather in-depth articles on key topics including:

  • Cyber security risk assessments, platforms and frameworks
  • Building cyber response programmes
  • Protective measures
  • Threat surface analysis and detection
  • Incident response and mitigation
  • Training ‘red’ teams
  • Crisis and reputation management
  • Recovering from a data breach
  • Employee and customer awareness, education and training
  • Workforce analysis and programmes
  • Reporting to senior executives and getting sufficient funding
  • Scenario planning, penetration testing and cyber security exercises
  • Reducing insurance premiums
  • Cyber security in the supply chain
  • Insider threats
  • Cloud security risk
  • Cyber warfare, cyber terrorism and state-sponsored attacks
  • Safe disposal of sensitive data
  • Cyber security investigations and digital/analogue forensics
  • Hackers’ techniques and motivations
  • Security architectures and network assurance
  • Internet fraud techniques
  • Encryption, cryptology and data protection 
  • User behaviour analytics

Identity Recovery Services – The smart idea in Cyber Security and Access Management

WHAT HAS IAM & CYBERSECURITY TO DO WITH A FAMOUS CAR CRASH OF A SOVIET LEADER ‪?

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New ways – Artificial Intelligence in Cyber Security

Defense against cyber attacks through new technologies

Author: Jochen Werne – published by Der Bank-Blog – 15 February 2019

Cyber crime has become a serious threat to business, politics and private individuals since a long time. New technologies based on the use of artificial intelligence might offer more security.

The fight against cyber threats has become significantly more complex for global government organisations, businesses, and individuals in recent years. Technical protection of IT systems and infrastructures and thus data security in the narrower sense are no longer the only issues. Companies, for example, need to address the much broader concept of information security.

Solutions based on artificial intelligence could prove helpful in the fight against cybercrime. According to a study by the IBM Institute for Business Value, the spread of intelligent, AI-based security solutions will increase significantly in the coming years.

Technical protective measures have long since been based on machine learning, for example, to identify spam or phishing e-mails or to record trends and anomalies in large amounts of data – both in data traffic within the corporate network and in its external connections.

Jochen Werne
Jochen Werne

AI systems for the identification of cyber attacks

In future, for example, systems might also be able to identify hidden channels in the corporate network through which cyber criminals attempt to acquire data. AI’s greatest strength, pattern recognition, enables automated detection of a wide range of anomalies and security incidents. For this purpose, however, AI-based systems must also learn to distinguish between common IT failures and cyber attacks. In addition, self-learning algorithms need to take internal corporate processes into account to come up with precise results.

In the near future, according to a forecast by Christian Nern, former Head of Security Software DACH at IBM Germany and today Partner at the Consulting firm KPMG, AI-based security analysis systems will be able to detect and fend off attacks proactively. Then, according to the former IBM security software chief, the confrontation between cyber criminals and security officers could possibly take place directly between the AI systems they use.

Germany as a pioneer country

Germany, which considers itself a pioneer country in the fields of learning systems and artificial intelligence, has already launched a platform for artificial intelligence on this topic initiated by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF): “Learning Systems”. The platform with its 200 members brings together leading experts from science, business and society and deals with technological, economic and social issues relating to the development and introduction of learning systems on an interdisciplinary and cross-sector basis.

One of the seven working groups deals in particular with IT security, privacy, law and ethics. The composition of the topics in this group shows the interwoven culture-specific discussions that will later lead to scenarios, recommendations, guidelines and roadmaps.

Intelligent combination of available modules

As often in cyber security topics, there is no patent solution for the numerous questions and challenges. A company-wide risk management system, which establishes appropriate technical and organisational measures and also takes into account findings from psychology and cultural studies, seems to be a sensible way forward.

The right balance between security awareness and security, individual freedom paired with increased personal responsibility as well as support through technology and organisational structure is probably the most promising approach in the current state of research and technology to effectively meet the challenges for information and IT security.

The Cultural Dimension of Cyber Threats

Country-specific aspects of cybercrime.

The number of cyber attacks on businesses, governments and individuals is increasing worldwide. The human being in his cultural environment is an important element. Different cultures seem to be associated with different susceptibilities.

by JOCHEN WERNE – Original published in German on January 18, 2019 at Der Bank-Blog – Translation with DeepL.com



In its annual management report “The Situation of IT Security in Germany 2018”, the Federal Office for Information Security records a threatening scenario: The number of cyber attacks on the federal government, German industry and private individuals is increasing at an alarming rate. Germany, in particular, is being massively targeted by criminal hackers.

One thing is certain: almost 90 percent of all cyber attacks have a criminal background. Approximately ten percent of all cyber attacks are caused by state cyber warriors. The goal of criminals is either personal data (account connections, credit card numbers, passwords, etc.) or capturing the computer for new attacks via bot network or to extort ransom money for the renewed release of the computer. The ransomware “Wannacry” is an equally prominent and frightening example of this. If state systems become the target of hackers, this usually results in sabotage, espionage and the spying out of trade secrets. The BSI discovered 800 million malicious programs for computer systems last year. In the previous year, the figure was 600 million – around 400,000 malware variants are added daily.

Cyber Security and the Human-Cultural Factor

The view must be directed to an important dimension of the human factor: The influence of different cultures on the handling of technology and in particular on the behaviour of individuals in the context of cyber security. Cultural peculiarities influence preferences, prejudices and behaviours. In his renowned book “The Culture Code”, anthropologist and marketing expert Dr. Clotaire Rapaille explores how members of different nationalities have developed very different codes for the image of products, companies or countries.

These findings come from client assignments in which Dr Rapaille conducted extensive interviews with focus groups to identify cultural preferences, prejudices, idiosyncrasies and behaviors. In more in-depth analyses, a piece of generalized psycho-cultural characteristics is then derived from representatives of the countries studied.

Country-specific aspects of cybercrime

Questions arise as to what protective concepts and guidelines might look like that take this background into account appropriately? And what role do cultural and country-specific aspects play here, such as the famous “German Angst” and corporate cultural aspects, such as the comparison of a classical hierarchical system versus Holacracy models, which have become increasingly en vogue in times of digital transformation?

Some concise examples from the findings of Dr. Rapaille: Americans define themselves strongly through their work. In this culture, professional activity largely determines the image of one’s own identity. The importance of money in this culture is proof of diligence and success.

The author sees completely different meanings in European countries. In France, for example, work and money are regarded more as “necessary means to an end” – those who can afford it expect at least a certain amount of entertainment and comfort from their job there. According to Dr. Rapaille, quality and technical perfection play an important and in some cases even absolute role in Germany or Japan, while US-Americans, according to his analyses, in many cases content themselves with “It just works” and are even sceptical about excessive perfection.

The author recognizes the Germans’ tendency towards perfectionism, which is partly exaggerated from a foreign point of view, as decisive for the quality of “German Engineering” and the global economic success of the Germans in this field. Dr. Rapaille is convinced that US culture, on the other hand, is characterized by a widespread refusal to grow up, which in turn leads to a great competitive advantage in the field of innovation.

Conclusions for more cyber security

This raises the question what are the appropriate protection concepts in an increasingly complex threat situation. A classic approach is the definition and enforcement of policies, both on a technical and organizational level, which are intended to guarantee compliance with security measures. The more hierarchically and authoritatively a corporate culture is aligned, the more restrictive the corresponding guidelines usually become.

However, the approach of establishing security primarily through bans and restrictions on user freedoms has proven to be double-edged in practice. The more the possibilities of an individual user are restricted, the more this encourages the tendency to escape the corset of safety-related rules.

A typical consequence is the “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) problem with which many company IT departments have been confronted for years – if the functions and authorizations of their work equipment are too limited, users bring private end devices with them to the workplace. These are then often not integrated at all into the protection and security concepts of the company. If the BYOD escape route is also suppressed, such measures often result in a refusal attitude à la “The desired is not possible with the means available – if the IT department wants it that way, then this task cannot be solved”.

Flat hierarchies and personal responsibility as a solution?

Is the better way, then, in holacracy models, in flat hierarchies, or in “loose reins” in terms of security and a strengthening of employees’ personal responsibility?

For the reasons derived in the preceding sections, this approach is by no means a guarantee for higher IT and information security. A healthy middle course could lie in adequate risk management. Technical and organisational security measures take into account the hazard level of specific data and applications. Sensitive areas and particularly sensitive data are subject to more stringent security measures, business areas or processes with less sensitivity are also protected, but assign employees a higher degree of personal responsibility. All protective measures take into account the above-mentioned psychological and cultural-historical findings.