How to use SWIFT’s Customer Security Programme to Create an Unfair Advantage for Your Business

As I’m sure you’re well aware, SWIFT’s new Customer Security Programme (CSP) calls for 27 mandatory and advisory controls designed to establish a “security baseline” for the SWIFT Community.

Baseline. As in lowest common denominator -- because that’s exactly was regulations are, rules designed to enforce minimum standards.

Don’t get me wrong. This move by SWIFT is a good one and it comes at a much needed time. Business email compromise scams have risen 1300% since January 2015, and a full 38% of organizations now admit that it’s difficult to tell the difference between a legitimate payment and a fraudulent one. Something certainly had to be done and the CSP is a good step in the right direction.

But what if you could give your organization an unfair advantage – an extra level of competiveness – by going beyond what’s called for in the CSP?

For more details see: https://www.bottomline.com/us/products/payment-fraud-swift?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=pulse&utm_campaign=swift_payment_fraud&utm_content=lr

If you aren’t sure what security has to do with your company’s ability to compete, let me explain.

73% of finance professionals report that their organizations experienced attempted or actual payment fraud in 2015. That’s a huge increase compared to previous years and it’s a statistic that’s getting exponentially worse by the day.

Because of this rise in cybersecurity incidents, it would be easy to make the argument that people are now inured to them; tuned out to the never-ceasing barrage of breaches reported in their newsfeed. From a day-to-day focus perspective, that may very well be the case. After all, there are only so many cyber security catastrophe headlines you can read before you stop paying attention. But what if the name of your business showed up in the news as the result of a breach? Your customers would surely notice then – and they would take their business elsewhere.

If your organization hasn’t been hit by a breach yet, congratulations. But you’re sitting on a virtual powder keg waiting to explode out from under you -- one that’s likely to take a devastating number of your customers with it.

Still think doing the least amount of cyber security preparedness sounds like a good idea?

Let’s turn this around and think about it strategically for a second. If customers are highly likely to leave you if they think you’re a security risk, wouldn’t they be pounding on your door if they believed you could provide them with far better security than the competition?

That’s the opportunity that’s hiding in this SWIFT CSP scenario.

To start, the CSP is largely mandatory. You have to make security a main focus of your business for the coming months anyway, so why not go above and beyond what SWIFT is asking for and turn it into a competitive advantage?

It wouldn’t be very difficult to do. The most stringent control CSP calls for is end-of-day log file reporting (basically, finding out that you’ve already been robbed). If you can instead be alerted to security issues in real-time and stop fraudulent payments before they happen, you’d look like nothing short of a super hero in the minds of your customers – and all for doing something that really just makes good business sense to begin with.

This isn’t a wild goose chase or a fairy tale. Real-time monitoring solutions that can identify threats and stop them before they cause long-term damage actually exist and they’re available now, whether you go it alone or use a service bureau. Find one and implement it as soon as possible. It’s the surest way to avoid financial losses and reputational damage. It also gives you the power to assure your customers that you can protect their payments, a move that will set you apart from the rest of the entire industry. If that isn’t one of the most important things you could do for your business is the coming months, then I don’t know what is.

Ultimately, this all comes down to stopping fraud before it happens, securing each and every payment that passes through your hands. That has got to be your ultimate goal. Don’t let an arbitrary set of security mandates convince you that anything less is acceptable. Instead, take this as a prime opportunity to seize the competitive advantage your peers don’t even realize is available to them.