Cybersecurity for financial services organisations

Cybersecurity for financial services organisations: Mitigate risk and ensure compliance

Strengthen cyber resilience and protect sensitive financial data with expert-led cybersecurity services from Evalian®. Identify and mitigate risk, meet regulatory requirements, and stay prepared for evolving threats with practical support tailored to your business.

What does cybersecurity for financial services look like?

Financial services firms process high-value data and transactions across interconnected applications, cloud platforms, APIs and third-party services. This creates a broad attack surface for threat actors seeking account credentials, payment data, personal information or access to critical systems. Firms must manage these risks while meeting demanding requirements for security, data protection and operational resilience.

Cybersecurity services give financial organisations access to specialist capability without requiring every security function to be maintained in-house. Evalian’s services, from outsourced DPO support to managed SOC, penetration testing and compliance consultancy, help firms identify exposure, validate controls, detect malicious activity and demonstrate how security risks are being managed.

The importance of cybersecurity within financial organisations

Financial institutions and credit unions are frequent targets for cyber attacks due to the high volume of personally identifiable information (PII) and financial records they hold. Unfortunately, data breaches directly correlate to significant monetary losses; financial breaches remain the most expensive in the UK, spiking to an average of £5.46 million per incident.

Weak security can also lead to:

• Disruption to critical services
• Fraud and unauthorised transactions
• Regulatory penalties and scrutiny
• Loss of customer trust
• Reputational damage
• Increased recovery costs

A risk-led security framework helps financial organisations find exploitable weaknesses, protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of sensitive information, and improve the speed and consistency of incident containment.

Let’s talk about your cybersecurity needs

Our cybersecurity services for finance and fintech businesses

Our cybersecurity services cover preventive, detective and responsive controls. We help you understand exposure, test whether controls operate as intended, improve threat visibility and establish clear processes for escalation, containment and recovery.

Cybersecurity consultancy

Take a smoother path to ISO 27001, ISO 22301, and applicable NIS 2 requirements, with consultancy services covering assessments, Information Security Management Systems (ISMS), internal audits, and certification preparation.

Learn more about ISO consultancy for your financial organisation

Supply chain security

Strengthen your supply chain security and reduce third-party risk with tailored services to manage the end-to-end process on your behalf. With SupplyIQ, our online supply chain security risk management tool, you can carry out supplier assessment, risk identification, risk rating, and supplier security improvement activities all in one place.

Learn more about keeping your supply chain secure

Cloud security

Create more secure cloud environments with expert assessments to identify misconfigurations and vulnerabilities across Microsoft 365, Azure, AWS, and GCP. Our cloud security assessment can include network security controls, encryption and key management, logging and monitoring, IAM, and auditing.

Understand how to keep your cloud apps secure 

Penetration testing

Get clear reports and practical remediation with CREST-approved penetration testing for infrastructure, web applications, mobile apps, and cloud environments. Identify vulnerabilities before an attacker can exploit them and test your cyber security response processes.

Learn about pen testing services

Incident response

Contain, investigate, and recover from cyber incidents, including ransomware, business email compromise, data breaches, and other events. From digital forensics investigation to tabletop exercises, communication planning, and post-incident reviews, we ensure every hour counts.

Create robust cyber response plans and use real-world simulations

vCISO as a Service

Get experienced cybersecurity leadership without the cost of a full-time CISO. Our vCISO service provides strategic security guidance, helping you assess and manage cyber risk, develop security programmes, strengthen governance, and align your security strategy with business and regulatory requirements.

Support to create your cybersecurity roadmap from experienced CISOs

SOC as a Service

Detect and respond to cyber threats swiftly with 24/7 SOC as a Service. Integrating with your existing environment, we provide continuous monitoring, threat detection, threat hunting, and expert incident response to help identify and contain threats before they cause greater disruption.

Understand how MDR can protect your business round the clock

Calculate the value of SOC as a Service

Not sure what 24/7 security monitoring could mean for your organisation? Use our SOC Calculator to estimate the potential cost and value of outsourcing your security operations, and see how SOC as a Service could fit into your cybersecurity strategy

Calculate your SOC costs

Finance industry challenges we solve

Financial services businesses face a unique combination of cyber threats and regulatory pressures, on top of operational risks. Evalian helps you address these challenges with practical cybersecurity services designed around your organisation’s specific risks and requirements.

	Cyber & Operational Resilience	Your financial organisation needs to remain secure and operational, as any attack or disruption can quickly affect critical services. Our services provide the resilience that’s essential for maintaining business continuity and customer trust.
	Security Risk & Control Management	You face a constantly changing risk landscape, with new threats, technologies and regulatory requirements creating new challenges. Evalian helps you understand where vulnerabilities exist and whether controls are effective so you can manage risk and maintain a strong security posture.
	Sensitive Data Protection	We protect the large volumes of sensitive personal and financial data your business holds, which is essential to prevent data breaches, financial loss and regulatory consequences, while maintaining the trust of customers and stakeholders.
	Cyber Incident Preparedness & Response	Even with effective security controls in place, no organisation can eliminate the risk of a cyber incident. Create a clear response plan with Evalian, with defined responsibilities and tested procedures that help your financial firm respond quickly to contain threats and minimise disruption when an incident occurs.
	Third-Party and Supply Chain Security	When you rely on a growing network of suppliers, technology providers and other third parties, risks can extend beyond your own systems and networks. We help you understand these dependencies and assess supplier security so you can identify vulnerabilities and reduce third-party risk.
	Security Awareness & Employee Behaviour	Employees play an important role in protecting your financial firm from cyber threats. Phishing and social engineering can exploit human behaviour, but our security awareness support helps employees recognise threats and follow secure practices.

Financial cybersecurity solutions with Evalian

Cyber threats we protect against

Phishing attacks

Protect your people and data from attackers who use deceptive emails and messages to trick your employees into revealing access to sensitive data or transferring funds. Awareness reduces exposure to these increasingly sophisticated threats.

Malware and ransomware

Reduce the risk of disruption caused by malicious software that gains unauthorised access and can steal information, or encrypt files and demand payment for their release. Identifying vulnerabilities and strengthening controls limits these attacks.

Denial-of-service

Keep your critical services available, protecting against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that overwhelm your systems and prevent users from accessing them. Protecting critical infrastructure helps keep essential financial services running.

Cyber threats

Close the gaps that attackers exploit, including vulnerabilities and weak access controls that can expose sensitive data and financial information. Regular assessments and better controls help identify and address these weaknesses.

Web application attacks

As a financial firm, you likely increasingly rely on web applications and APIs to deliver online banking, payments, insurance and other digital services. Identify the vulnerabilities that can expose sensitive data and compromise accounts by making regular security testing essential.

Talk to us about your finance organisation’s cybersecurity challenges

Cybersecurity FAQs for financial services

What is financial cybersecurity?

Security protects financial institutions and their clients from cyber threats. This involves taking measures to safeguard the integrity and confidentiality of sensitive financial data while keeping it available. Financial cybersecurity is essential for reducing the risk of cyber attacks and preventing internal databases from unauthorised access.

What are the challenges of securing financial institutions?

Financial services is one of the sectors most targeted by cyber criminals. Not only do you have to defend against a wide variety of sophisticated threats, from phishing emails to cloud-based attacks and ransomware, but other challenges include rapid digital transformation and complex supply chains, which create more potential entry points for attackers. Financial organisations also hold highly sensitive customer information, making them particularly valuable targets. Meanwhile, increasingly complex regulatory requirements add further pressure to maintain strong security controls.

How does digital transformation affect the attack surface of financial services firms?

Digital banking, cloud platforms, APIs, third-party integrations and remote access can expand a financial organisation’s attack surface by creating more systems and connections that need to be secured. As this environment grows, firms need to continuously identify exposed assets, assess vulnerabilities and review access controls to reduce opportunities for attackers.

How should cybersecurity be structured for financial organisations?

Effective cybersecurity for financial organisations takes a layered approach, starting with access controls to determine who can reach which systems and data. This should be updated continuously as employees come and go, or engagements end, not just reviewed quarterly.

Next, detection and monitoring identify anomalous behaviour before it escalates. Regular vulnerability assessments and penetration testing can then uncover weaknesses before attackers exploit them, while incident response plans provide a clear process for containing and recovering from threats. Security awareness training, third-party risk management and ongoing compliance activities add further layers of protection across your business.

Which regulatory requirements should financial organisations comply with?

Financial services firms must navigate a complex regulatory landscape covering cybersecurity, data protection, operational resilience and third-party risk. Depending on their activities and jurisdiction, requirements may include:

• DORA: Establishes requirements for digital operational resilience in the EU financial sector, including ICT risk management, incident management, resilience testing and third-party risk.
• GDPR: Requires financial organisations handling personal data to put appropriate technical and organisational measures in place to protect it and manage data security risks.
• NIS2: Strengthens cybersecurity requirements for medium and large organisations in designated critical sectors, including banking and financial market infrastructure.
• PCI DSS: Applies to organisations that handle payment card data and sets security requirements designed to protect cardholder information.
• ISO 27001: While not a regulation, provides a structured, risk-based framework for establishing and continually improving an information security management system.