Article
Cybersecurity in banking: Trends and tactics for 2025
Jan. 16, 2025 · Authored by Christopher J. Tait, Himanshu Sharma
In 2024’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, financial institutions continued to be prime targets for cyber threats. As we look forward to 2025, financial institutions must continue to innovate and integrate best practices to face the ever-changing risk landscape that can compromise your institution's data, disrupt your operations and ultimately impact customer trust. Our practitioners have compiled the common trends, risks posed to financial institutions and provided insight to help with cybersecurity in banking in 2025.
Key trends shaping the banking and cybersecurity environment
Banks, from community institutions to global giants, are rapidly digitizing their services and leveraging advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to enhance customer experience. However, this innovation introduces new challenges, such as securing a broader digital footprint.
- Considerations: Prioritize cybersecurity as a core component of your digital transformation strategy.
While AI technology is known to bolster threat detection and response timing, cybercriminals are weaponizing it for more sophisticated attacks, such as AI-enabled phishing and deepfake scams.
- Considerations: Institutions need to leverage AI and automation to enhance their defenses. In addition, the ongoing investment in employee training is critical to help them recognize and respond to these evolving threats.
With an increase in banking operations migrating to the cloud, robust encryption, multifactor authentication and regular audits have become more essential than ever.
- Considerations: Develop a comprehensive cloud security strategy that includes both technology solutions and regular audits to maintain compliance.
Regulatory agencies have increased their focus on cybersecurity, requiring financial institutions to adhere to strict guidelines and reporting standards. The FFIEC Cybersecurity Assessment Tool (CAT) will no longer be supported as of Aug. 31, 2025. This change leaves organizations searching for a new framework that they can tailor to their needs, while maintaining the ability to meet regulatory requirements.
- Considerations: Look to treat compliance efforts as a continuous improvement process to maintain resilience. While regulatory agencies have not pointed to a specific framework to be adopted, the goal is that institutions can adopt a framework that continues to evolve as quickly as the threat landscape.
Financial institutions continue to rely heavily on third-party vendors, which increases risk exposure. Effective risk management practices are essential to mitigate these vulnerabilities.
- Considerations: Conduct regular assessments of third-party vendors and continue to enforce stringent cybersecurity requirements on your vendors.
