Bank of England to protect financial firms with new cyber standards

The Bank of England (BoE) has announced plans to introduce new cyber standards to help boost protection from cybersecurity attacks amongst financial services firms.

The new standards will be published by UK financial services regulatory body the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), which is led by BoE Deputy Governor Sam Woods.

Resilience

Whilst nothing has been finalised for the publication of the new standards, they could be introduced before the end of 2018. The standards will apply to firms within the financial services sector, such as banks, insurers and investment firms, and will aim to boost their operational resilience when it comes to cybersecurity attacks.

Several of the UK’s major banks already have cyber resilience requirements in place, including Lloyds, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland. However, the PRA believes that more needs to be done to increase cyber resilience.

Challenges

Woods highlighted the issue of cyber-attacks amongst finance firms, commenting that the financial system in Britain is “under almost constant cyber-attack.”

He also spoke out about the new Open Banking rules, which were introduced in early 2018, stating that he believes that the regulations will create more challenges as banks will be required to share their customer data with third parties if their customers give them permission to do so.