Security or Service?
Security. Stability. Service. Mantras for 2011 

The need for banking vigilance against fraud is perpetual, but one “hair-tearingly convoluted experience” encourages SIMON THOMPSON to plead for more sense about security.

It’s instructive how, just occasionally, the smallest task can generate the deepest fury – and yet produce a genuinely useful insight that nags in the mind.

The other day, I spent a 25-minute eternity clearing the frustrating security hurdles required by my bank to make an online payment of all of £6 to a friend. The procedure meant using my card-reader three times – once to verify the card, once to authorise a new payee, and finally to sanction the payment itself.

The instructions were hair-tearingly convoluted and the experience angrily drained me of much of the goodwill I’ve had for a bank that’s known me as a customer for the past 25 years. It surely becomes nonsense when security can suffocate service in this manner.

But is it that simple? Security is vital, and that’s why, in this issue, we rehearse many of the threats, policy responses and operational contradictions in the way financial services institutions are confronting the threats of fraud (Detection and prevention pp17-29).

As individual and business customers, we have every right to expect our banks to be adept in maintaining the security of the information they keep about us. And, for their part, banks themselves are quite rightly vigilant about both the monetary and reputational damage they stand to suffer from ‘losing’ personal data to unauthorised operators.

And here, there’s no denying just how much more complicated the banking world has become since the days when it was comforting to imagine your money safe in a vault with just one big key.

Today, electronic financial transmission has become fast and highly sophisticated – and so have the criminals who stalk those transmissions and whose skill in breaching security information can undermine the trust on which the stability of the system relies.

But confronting that threat requires common sense about security from customers every bit as much as from their banks – a duty to be careful about protecting their own personal information. And the banks need a similarly common sense approach to ensure that their absolute duty to protect customer data is balanced against a striving for service that’s based on genuinely knowing their customers.

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