Financial services firms face mounting challenges with complex environments, evolving regulations, and AI-enhanced threats. To optimize their cybersecurity posture, organizations should prioritize implementing zero-trust principles, leveraging generative AI to accelerate security workflows, and consolidating point tools with a unified platform. These focused priorities build cyber resilience and protect brand integrity in an increasingly hostile threat landscape.

Financial Services Firms Must Prioritize Both Advanced Security and Efficient Operations

This Enterprise Strategy Group Infographic was commissioned by Check Point Software and is distributed under license from TechTarget, Inc.

Financial services organizations are under pressure to prioritize innovation and agility while ensuring the proper safeguards are in place to protect corporate assets and customer data. While this is a reality for organizations across many industries, it is particularly true of financial services organizations. The competitiveness of the sector, the regulatory aspects of the industry, and focus from attackers due to the sensitive and valuable customer information financial services organizations handle, all play into this. Yet many continue to cite significant challenges in these key areas.

While financial services organizations have a lot of competing priorities, all would benefit from implementing strong threat prevention, simplifying operational complexity, building cyber resilience, and streamlining compliance. These goals can be supported by emphasizing zero-trust tenets across the environment to ensure web applications and APIs are fully protected, implementing AI-enabled solutions to support both threat prevention and security operations and prioritizing platforms to promote efficiency and simplify wherever possible.

Complexity, Compliance, and Increasing Attacks Pose Issues for Financial Services Firms

Platforms Can Help But Must Deliver a Broad Range of Capabilities

Key Network Security Challenges:

44+56+S 40+60+S 36+64+S

44%

40%

36%

Maintaining consistent visibility across the entire environment.

Ensuring compliance requirements are met.

Managing an increase in threat volume.

Even as organizations continue to move workloads to the cloud, on-premises data centers remain a reality. Unless properly integrated, which takes time and costs money, siloed security tools often deliver diminishing returns.

Financial services organizations are subject to a wide variety of regulations across all geographies. Maintaining compliance requires a wide range of capabilities, which makes meeting these regulations and regularly reporting on compliance operationally complex.

Attackers continue to target known vulnerabilities and leverage traditional malware and ransomware, while also taking advantage of zero days and more distributed environments to move laterally within an organization.

Check Point has found that the financial services sector is targeted with an average of 1,510 attacks weekly, an increase of 30% over 2023.

96% agreed that generative AI will greatly enhance the efficacy and efficiency of security operations tools like extended detection and response (XDR) and security incident and event management (SIEM).

78% 71% 80%

agreed that zero trust has decreased the number of cyber incidents.

agreed that zero trust has reduced the effort needed to maintain and report on compliance.

agreed that zero trust has improved SOC efficiency.

While there are benefits security teams can gain from generative AI, nearly all financial services organizations fear that attackers are also gaining advantage on this front. Overall, 92% of respondents to research from Informa TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group believed that, as generative AI innovation continues, cyber adversaries will gain the biggest advantage.

Most Feel Generative AI Will Only Make Things More Difficult

Security professionals believe attackers will use generative AI to:

92+8+S 92% believed that, as generative AI innovation continues, cyber adversaries will gain the biggest advantage.

Craft convincing phishing

Automate malware creation

Exploit the corporate use of GenAI tools

Scale attacks faster

780+220= 710+290= 800+200=

100%0%

1. Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, The Evolution of Network Security: What Security Teams Require From Firewalls in a Cloud-centric World, October 2024. 2. “State of Cyber Security 2025”, checkpoint.com, January 2025. 3. Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, Generative AI for Cybersecurity: An Optimistic but Uncertain Future, April 2024. 4. Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, Trends in Zero Trust Strategies and Practices Remain Fragmented, but Many Are Seeing Success, March 2024. 5. Enterprise Strategy Group Complete Survey Results, 2024 XDR and SOC Modernization Trends, May 2024.

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Enterprise-class security vendors, which have historically offered broad sets of tools to address a variety of use cases and provided strong threat detection supported by global threat intelligence, now understand the critical need to tie their offerings together using platforms. Prioritizing vendors that provide the overarching capabilities discussed and support these goals using a centralized platform approach can help build cyber resilience, improve efficiency, streamline regulatory compliance, lower costs, and maintain brand integrity.

Conclusion

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