5 Ways Banks Can Achieve Seamless Security and Compliance in 2025

1. Automate Regulatory Compliance

To keep up with regulatory requirements, banks must integrate compliance measures in their operational fabric so they can focus on delivering value, according to Harvard Business Review. Incorporating automation can help.

Banks can leverage governance, risk and compliance platforms to automate regulatory compliance efforts. GRC solutions, such as those from ServiceNow, IBM and Splunk, leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to track regulatory updates, automate compliance workflows and generate audit-ready reports. That makes it easier to always stay compliant, even when regulations change.

“Through the strategic integration of automation tools and technologies, businesses achieve a state of perpetual readiness, ensuring that they adhere to legal and regulatory standards and secure their operations against emerging threats,” notes Splunk in a company blog post.

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2. Use Advanced Transaction Monitoring for Fraud Prevention

Banks must be equipped to monitor transactions more vigilantly as financial crime keeps worsening. Represented as a sector of the U.S. economy, money laundering has a higher gross domestic product percentage than mining and utilities combined, according to Nasdaq. And the Federal Trade Commission reveals that consumers lost over $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, a 25% increase from 2023 as fraud attempts become more complex.

“We’re seeing everything from deepfake CEOs asking for wire transfers to scammers using cloned voices to fool bank customer service agents,” Adam Ennamli, chief risk officer at General Bank of Canada, tells Fortune. He says that these AI-powered scam attempts make up roughly half of all fraud attempts since the democratization of AI as a productivity tool.

Fortunately, AI can also be the solution. AI-powered tools such as Palo Alto Networks’ Cortex XSOAR platform can analyze real-time transactions for suspicious activity, improving anti-money laundering compliance and fraud detection while minimizing false positives. According to the Treasury Department, “Staying ahead of technologically adept fraudsters requires proactive, AI-enhanced fraud detection methods.”

3. Implement Zero-Trust Security and IAM

Zero trust is a popular solution for bolstering an organization’s cybersecurity. But many organizations are still early in their implementation, yet to incorporate identity and access management measures and a long way from reaching advanced zero-trust maturity.

Using tools such as Okta, CyberArk and Microsoft Entra ID, however, banks can set up zero-trust frameworks with greater ease. This allows for seamless integration of multifactor authentication and other IAM tools while ensuring only authorized users and devices can access financial systems, enabling faster movement through all five stages of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Zero Trust Maturity Model.

To ensure zero trust is enacted properly, banks can also leverage a rapid maturity assessment such as CDW’s, which measures an organization’s IT environment against the CISA model.

4. Run AI-Powered Risk and Compliance Analytics

Most financial services organizations are pursuing new technological solutions such as AI-powered analytics programs to enhance their security posture, according to Nasdaq’s recent global financial crime report. And for good reason. “As compliance pressure mounts and financial crime evolves, organizations that do not plan to increase spending on AI will need to identify alternative means to strengthen their financial crime management programs,” the report notes.

Increased AI spending is well used on technologies such as Tenable’s AI compliance platform, Arctic Wolf’s  managed detection and response tool and Google Cloud’s Secure AI Framework. Incorporating generative AI capabilities, these solutions analyze vast amounts of financial data to identify risk patterns and regulatory gaps, helping banks stay ahead of compliance issues before they arise. That’s why companies such as Barclays have long used analytical AI.

“If we think about fraud as a set of rules, AI allows us to read patterns of behaviour that produce warnings,” writes Craig Bright, group CIO at Barclays, in a company blog post. “Analytical AI has long helped us manage fraud and money laundering risks, and generative AI creates opportunities to help us reduce these even more — something that is absolutely essential for us as a bank.”

EXPLORE: CDW’s financial service technology solutions that can help your team.

5. Secure Cloud-Based Data Storage and Encryption

One of the primary motivations for cloud adoption in financial services is “the potential for increased resilience to physical and cyber incidents, with the use of multiple data centers or regions from the same CSP and broader use of encryption,” according to the Treasury Department’s recent cloud report. Because it makes a difference.

Banks can leverage cloud-based solutions such as AWS Nitro Enclaves, Microsoft Azure confidential computing and IBM Cloud for Financial Services to securely process and store sensitive financial data, all while meeting industry standards. This way, banks are able to further bolster their cybersecurity to protect against financial crime and increase consumer trust even as threats and regulations keep evolving.

“Organizations that invest now in robust, resilient data storage and protection solutions won’t only protect themselves against current threats and optimize their environments for existing opportunities, they will also position themselves to seamlessly adapt to whatever comes next,” CDW experts Marc Litten and Rashid Rodriguez write in a company blog post.