In the wake of recent well-publicized data breaches, the financial services industry is looking at tokenization as a means of improving the security around payments.

With fraud prevention, many banks emphasize how their systems leverage “big data” to find patterns of unusual activity by using data analytics to process through millions of transactions and pinpoint fraudulent activity.

Finally, years after the global financial crisis and the new regulations and consumer mistrust it produced, banks are looking at forecasts of increased consumer and commercial lending activity.

With the endless storm of data breaches, the concept of tokenization has taken the financial industry by storm.

We live in dangerous times, when it’s not uncommon for criminals to know more about the identity of a bank’s customers than the bank itself.

These days, it seems like the latest data breach is detailed in breaking headlines on a daily basis.

Opportunity for one doesn’t always mean opportunity for all, but unfortunately, it does in banking.

The deluge of news stories in recent years regarding stolen personal data and the increasing issue of identity theft highlights a problem that financial institutions cannot afford to ignore.

Credit card data breaches are much in the news these days, with the recent problems at Home Depot following on the heels of the well-publicized debacle at Target earlier this year.

Now that most of the largest U.

In the wake of highly publicized cyber-breaches, such as the data theft from 34 European banks in July, bank management may be more focused than ever on security threats from outside the bank.

At a time when financial institutions are focusing on the new dangers of mobile fraud, an old enemy keeps rearing its head: check fraud, as seen in the recent discovery of a three-year, $15 million check-kiting scheme.

As a former Federal Reserve executive as well as currently a director for a regional bank, I’ve had the unique opportunity to observe how fraud in the financial arena has evolved.

Customer-centric strategies are evolving with the ever increasing amount of available information, including data that is generated outside of bank interactions with other third-parties such as communications providers or social networks.

Financial institutions are increasingly adopting mobile authentication for online/Internet banking and deploying mobile platforms that enable customers to conduct banking transactions anytime, anywhere.

I have recently spent a lot of time talking about KYC (Know Your Client), AML (Anti Money Laundering, often confused with ALM which is Asset and Liability Management), Client Onboarding, PEPs (Politically Exposed Persons) and SARs (Suspicious Activity Reports).

Cybersecurity is a large and complex problem, and as more banking operations move into a digital environment, the threat will only grow.

With all of the recent retailer data breaches, card-related fraud is clearly top-of-mind for financial institutions.

In today’s hyper-connected world, the fight against payments fraud, money laundering and other cyber threats is challenging for banks and other financial institutions around the world.

The conversation about identity theft is growing – Hollywood even explored the topic in the 2013 movie “Identity Thief” – and in that conversation is a bankable loyalty solution.