For more than 160 years, Credit Suisse has been providing customers with best-in-class wealth management, investment banking, and financial services. As one of the largest multinational financial firms, technology is critical to the company’s global operations — and with nearly 50,000 employees worldwide, there is a high standard for efficient, adaptable IT systems.
Each year, Credit Suisse recognizes the firm’s top five technology partners that are transforming traditional approaches to IT technology at an enterprise level. We are honored to have been named to Credit Suisse’s Disruptive Technology Recognition (DTR) Program for 2021. As part of the DTR program, Immuta has the opportunity to collaborate with Credit Suisse and its partners on promoting and improving innovation throughout the enterprise.
“Our DTR program looks specifically for game-changing companies that focus on improving enterprise technology, with broad applicability across industries,” Anurag Sehgal, Managing Director and Head of IB Data Analytics, Data & Digital Innovation Incubator at Credit Suisse said in a statement. As one of the 2021 award recipients, Immuta was chosen based on our unique ability to improve enterprise technology across industries and cloud data platforms, and joins our partners Databricks and Snowflake, which have won in previous years, in sharing this esteemed title.
“We saw last year’s winners have a significant impact across industry verticals, and we expect this year’s nominees to follow in these big footsteps,” said Group Information Officer for Credit Suisse Laura Barrowman. “We have high expectations for the new award nominees as we take the DTR program into 2021 and are excited to see how they will raise the bar for the future of enterprise technology.”
For financial services firms like Credit Suisse, Immuta helps data teams control data access, security, and privacy protection for modern analytics platforms. Given the nature of financial services and volume of sensitive data its processes require, secure data use is imperative to driving insights while also adhering to strict industry regulations and contractual agreements.
Let’s explore the key benefits Immuta’s financial services customers experience.
Financial institutions often operate in various locations and offer a range of services — take Credit Suisse as an example. The organization provides a full range of services, including wealth management, retail, and commercial banking, investment banking, and advisory services. As such, its analysts’ roles and responsibilities cover a broad spectrum — the data a wealth management analyst needs is not necessarily appropriate for a colleague focused on capital markets.
As firms integrate data environments to create views of clients’ activities across platforms, traditional role-based access controls become unscalable. Furthermore, financial firms operating on more than one cloud data platform or straddling cloud and on-prem environments would be forced to establish access controls on each individual platform — a labor-intensive task for data teams who could be using that time operationalizing data for analysis.
Immuta’s automated, fine-grained data access control ensures analysts have the right level of access to the right data at the right time, without requiring copies or adding new infrastructure. Dynamic policies based on data and user attributes enforce data protection at query time, and can even limit data usage to specific purposes. This can protect financial institutions from unauthorized access stemming from data sharing and enables scalability — a single attribute-based access control policy in Immuta can replace more than 100 roles, saving data teams time and reducing security risks and liability.
In addition to data access control, financial services firms need to further protect sensitive data from threats like inference attacks and re-identification. Oftentimes, this requires moving or copying data in order to apply masking techniques — a risky process in and of itself. To efficiently prepare data for secure use by analysts, dynamic data masking is key.
Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) in Immuta, including k-anonymization, differential privacy, and conditional masking, are applied using Immuta’s policy-as-code approach. This allows data teams to author no-code policies in plain language and apply them across platforms, so that data is automatically masked, hashed, or encrypted according to user permissions. This enables consistent protection of client account data regardless of platform, use case, or access level — without requiring a PhD in math.
Immuta’s research found that 88% of organizations are subject to data use rules and regulations — and in the financial services industry, that number approaches 100%. Wealth management and investment and commercial banking require extensive amounts of personally identifiable information (PII), and are regulated accordingly. Layered on top of government and industry regulations are contractual agreements, employment obligations, and more.
Financial institutions like Credit Suisse therefore need fine-grained auditing and reporting capabilities that show who accessed what data, for what purpose, and at what time. Immuta’s data audit trail monitoring logs all requests and access to data, policy changes, ways in which data is used, and specific queries from a single policy tier. This allows financial firms’ data teams that leverage multiple cloud data platforms to truly centralize data auditing. Additionally, since Immuta archives data fingerprints over time, data users can reference earlier data snapshot summaries — an important capability in an industry that is constantly evolving.
“Immuta’s platform checks [the] boxes by fundamentally changing how we use and share enterprise analytics data,” said Sehgal. “What makes Immuta unique is how its platform unlocks our data’s value by making it automatically, yet securely available to all the analysts who need it – regardless of what BI or data science tools they’re using. What would normally require a team of data engineers and complex approval processes can be automated with Immuta — reducing time to data, infrastructure costs, and security vulnerabilities. Immuta is quickly becoming a transformative technology in Credit Suisse’s modern data platform.”
For more on securing and protecting financial data, check out The Ultimate Guide to Data Security for Financial Services. To find out how you can use Immuta to unlock more value from financial services data, visit https://www.immuta.com/solutions/financial-services/ or request a demo today.
