U.S. regulators are saying cyberattacks pose the greatest risk to U.S. banks in upcoming years, but the regulation and testing processes are convoluted and complicated for institutions in both spaces to assess, according to a report by the Financial Times.
Several regulators want to come up with a multi-agency cybersecurity approach that tests banks in a coordinated way. Right now, different regulators look at different pieces of the same bank. This means banks have to deal with numerous questions from different regulators who aren’t potentially seeing the big picture of the bank’s cyber weaknesses.
Regulators say cyberattacks could cause havoc to financial systems, crashing payment systems, exposing confidential customer data and generally posing a threat to the banking industry, which relies much more heavily on data than it used to.
When examining a bank’s credit risks, regulators take a cooperative approach that involves the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which work under the Shared National Credit Review. Cybersecurity regulators want a similar…