CTEM Establishes a Risk-Driven Approach for Banks and Credit Unions

What Is CTEM in Banking Cybersecurity?

CTEM follows a structured, continuous process. Bell describes it as five stages: “It’s effectively five steps in the maturation — scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation and mobilization.”

For banks and credit unions, these stages focus on high-value systems:

• Scoping identifies critical assets such as core banking, payments and digital channels
• Discovery uncovers vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and attack paths
• Prioritization ranks risks based on financial impact and likelihood of exploitation
• Validation simulates attacks to confirm which exposures are exploitable
• Mobilization coordinates remediation across teams

Cartwright notes that CTEM expands beyond traditional scanning.

“Typically, in vulnerability management, you have a scanner, you detect vulnerabilities and you patch them,” he says. “That tends to happen in a silo of the security organization. With CTEM, you need to identify your sources of data across the enterprise, aggregate all of that data, deduplicate it, add business context and then have a mobilization layer to remediate.”

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Why CTEM Matters for Financial Institutions

Security teams are increasingly overwhelmed. “Their security operations center teams are overloaded on software vulnerabilities,” Cartwright says. “Every single day, there are new critical vulnerabilities coming out. Their teams just can’t handle remediating all of those without impacting the business.”

At the same time, traditional programs often miss key risks — including misconfigured cloud environments, nonsecure application programming interfaces and overpermissioned identities.

“What about exposures related to misconfigured systems or risky configurations?” Cartwright asks. “It’s not necessarily a vulnerability, but it’s the way the system has been deployed.”

Without business context, teams struggle to prioritize effectively, often reacting to alerts instead of focusing on protecting critical systems and member data.

“There’s a generalized fear of what AI is bringing to overall threat approaches,” Bell says. “Point-in-time analysis is really insufficient. Customers want a more continuous ability to evaluate their risk posture.”

How CTEM Sharpens Risk Focus

CTEM helps institutions move from overwhelming vulnerability counts to actionable insight.

“When you start to look at threat exposure in a continuous fashion,” Cartwright says, “you discover overpermissioned identities, attack paths through your help desk, or weaknesses in cloud and public-facing applications.”

Validation helps narrow the focus even further.

“Rather than saying, ‘We have 10,000 vulnerabilities,’ you may realize there are only two attack paths that can get to critical data,” Bell explains. “That helps them focus a lot.”

Prioritizing What Matters Most

A common misconception is that CTEM requires tracking every asset.

“People make assumptions that they need to account for literally every asset,” Bell says. “They get bogged down because they’re not bringing risk into play.”

Instead, CTEM helps teams prioritize effectively.

“It actually helps you figure out what you don’t need to remediate,” Bell says. “Once people move from, ‘I’ve got to account for everything’ to, ‘Oh, wait a minute, this is going to help me prioritize,’ that’s a revelatory moment.”

This depends on strong business context — understanding how systems support services such as lending, payments and member services.

“They’re not coming to the table already knowing who owns this asset, how it’s used, what business process it’s a part of,” Cartwright says.

FIND OUT: Is your organization ready for CTEM?

Measuring Success and Getting Started

Traditional metrics don’t tell the full story.

“Closing more vulnerabilities than you are opening is good,” Bell says. “But that doesn’t tell executive teams very much about actual business risk.”

CTEM shifts measurement toward outcomes such as reduced exposure of sensitive data and fewer exploitable attack paths.

“They failed to incorporate the risk management aspect and turned it into a collecting and categorizing exercise,” Bell says. “You need to establish milestones that indicate you’ve had success.”

When getting started, many organizations focus on tools — but CTEM is a program first.

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“I think a lot of customers like to identify, ‘What’s the solution? What’s the platform that can do this for me?’” Cartwright says.

“I like to steer them back to it being a program first, then focus on the tools.”

Successful programs require clear risk definitions, visibility into business processes and collaboration across IT, security and risk teams.

“To determine risk and potential impact, you have to understand the processes and functions that would be impacted,” Cartwright says.

Automation is also key. “The continuous part of CTEM is not just continuous information and data,” Bell says. “It’s also trying to automate some of the remediation tasks.”

Ultimately, CTEM helps answer critical questions. “When you’re faced with a threat,” Cartwright says, “a program like CTEM helps answer the questions: Are we vulnerable? Can this be exploited in our environment? And how does this risk impact the business?”