If you work in the financial services world, your data security is your top priority. Between strict regulations around security and privacy, and the target on your back for cybercriminals, you have no room for error when it comes to protecting your customer and company data.

But your challenges don't end there. As technology becomes more advanced, your customers increasingly want to do business with you online and on the go. They expect to have the types of personalized, consistent and convenient user experiences they get with their favorite brands, despite the fact that you aren't selling coffee drinks or Christmas gifts. Your customers expect you to figure out how to give them an exceptional experience, as well as a secure one.

We know how hard that really is. As experts in identity and access management (IAM), we also know that identity holds the key to keeping all those balls in the air. Mixed metaphors aside, you really can solve for the many challenges you face with a financial-grade IAM solution.

Helps You Comply with Regulations

With the right IAM solution, you can control access to your identity data, securely share it and capture customer consent. You can encrypt cardholder identity data in every state--at rest, during replication and in motion. Thanks to an auditable paper trail, you can even track when, how and by whom identity data was accessed. Plus, you can govern application access to cardholder data minimizing the potential scope of a breach. When you rely on IAM, you're not just ensuring compliance, you're developing and maintaining more secure systems and applications.

Increases Security and Reduces Risk

An identity and access management solution provides strong security starting at authentication and extending to the application and data layers. It starts with multi-factor authentication (MFA) and gaining a high level of assurance that users are who they say they are. After authentication, your IAM solution allows you to control customer, partner and employee access to applications based on conditional access policies. You're able to securely manage identity data and encrypt it at rest, in transit and in use. Finally, you're able to effectively reduce risk by controlling access to that data on a case-by-case basis.

Improves Customer Experience

Single sign-on capabilities will ensure that your digital properties and services are easily accessible, whether they reside on premises or in the cloud. An IAM solution for financial services applications should enable your customers to single sign-on (SSO) just once to access both your and your partner services. It should also support a unified customer profile to ensure your customers' experience continues across channels once they're logged in. By allowing each of your digital properties to access a single view of the customer's preferences, privacy consents and other profile data, IAM will ensure you deliver exceptional customer experiences from login through logout.

Fosters Agility and Innovation

With modern identity services, you can integrate new applications and quickly deploy to the cloud. A leading IAM solution will offer a versatile hybrid deployment model, so you can rapidly connect SaaS applications, as well as legacy and enterprise web applications. It also provides directory capabilities to enables quick onboarding of partners and self-management of their own employees' identities. The result is seamless one-click access to all the apps your employees, customers and partners want and need.

Financial services organizations have to make compliance data security their top priorities. But the pressure is on to deliver consistent and personalized user experiences, as well as deploy new applications and services. Identity and access management can help you meet all of these challenges, and likely even a few more.

To learn more about how IAM can serve your financial services organization, visit our financial services solutions page.