Why Financial Services Industry Should Avoid Using Free Messaging Apps

Instant messaging apps have reinvented the way we communicate with the world today. Either for casual conversations or for exchange of business information, mobile apps like WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook messenger, LinkedIn messaging, Telegram, Facetime, etc. have made a strong presence.

The financial companies should rethink their communication methods

But the growing number of communication platforms and apps brings in innumerable available options to choose from, which sometimes becomes baffling as well as complicated, especially in a business scenario. Employees using varied communication tools to communicate with the teams, admins, and managers add an extra layer of complexity for companies. Especially, the banking and finance industry is getting a hang of these risks posed by the prevalence of free and commercial instant messaging apps used by their employees. Having a secure team communication app is becoming more and more crucial for financial organizations.

According to the Boston Consulting Group report[1], financial services are hit by cyberattacks 300 times more than businesses in other sectors. Due to the nature of their businesses and the sensitivity of their data, banks and financial institutes are more susceptible to security breaches and cyber-attacks. The report also states that financial institutes are somewhat indifferent towards implementing an overall culture of security within their organizational culture.

However, the frequent security breach incidents make it mandatory for the financial companies to prepare and train their employees about how to prevent such attacks and incidents, and how to respond to such situations to mitigate risks and loss. Prevention of these incidents is definitely the priority.

Why to avoid open and free messaging platforms

Avoiding the usage of free and commercial messaging apps can surely be a great step. Apart from raising security concerns, these open/commercial messaging platforms can come with the following limitations.

· The availability of numerous free messaging apps makes team communication highly fragmented wherein different employees tend to use different messaging apps.

· There is a clear lack of corporate supervision over business communication and sensitive information that is exchanged between employees.

· In most cases, these messages are not stored or sent in an encrypted format, which makes critical data even more vulnerable to data breaches and hacks.

· Employees using free messaging apps cannot utilize the benefits of organized and systematic enterprise contact management.

· Lack of sufficient corporate governance can lead to distractions, errors and unwanted interruptions at work leading to loss of productive hours

When it comes to driving secure team collaboration, it is imperative for financial institutes to look out for a business-only team communication app that supports the necessary security measures like message encryption and usage restrictions. This ensures that information exchanged between employees is never compromised by incidents like unauthorized access to data or device, device loss/misplacement or data breach.

Scalefusion’s Eva Communication Suite can be a perfect example of a secure team communication app for the multiple powerful security and monitoring features it offers, which empowers the IT admin to keep a track of all the business communications/information exchange across the team.

Source:

[1] — Boston Consulting Group: https://www.bcg.com/publications/2019/global-wealth-reigniting-radical-growth.aspx