Banks are the cornerstone of Indian economy and are continuously increasing its reach and striving to excel in their services through extensive use of Information technology. Technology, with its innovative solutions and tools, creates immense possibilities for banking industry to grow and bring the customers under the fold of technology driven transformation. However, the technology transformation, characterized by wide spread use of the Internet, with the new impetus for mobile, for financial transactions and gradual evolution of underlying and backend infrastructure, becomes a reason for concern also. It exposes a banking organization to a newer set of security threats; some of them are heavily concentrated towards the industry, aiming for financial gain. The security threats are becoming more organized and sophisticated in their intent, tactics and style of execution, posing serious threats to the banking industry.

Managing security in banking industry is a complex challenge requiring — in-depth analysis of how security impacts the banking operations, identification of security threat vector pertaining to banking industry and the evolution of it, review of the security initiatives undertaken by the industry and evaluation of different approaches, trends and technologies that have been emerging to address the specific challenges. In recent years, privacy of data being collected, processed and shared by organizations has emerged in the discussion landscape in the country. The amendment to the IT Act has fostered this discussion, demanding organizations to implement reasonable security practices to protect the ‘sensitive personal information’ they are handling . The concerns of the end customers and regulatory initiatives call for a review of the banking industry initiatives from data privacy perspective.

On the one hand, the security as well as privacy challenges have been accumulating and on the other hand, the underlying technology becoming more complex and business flexibility is creating more exposure points, and compliance requirements are mounting more pressure. This necessitates a dialogue between the industry leaders, security managers, industry professionals, technology experts, legal professionals, regulatory bodies and the government. The 2nd IBA-DSCI Banking Security Conference provides a platform to facilitate this dialogue. As experienced in the 1st IBA-DSCI conference, this conference will provide an opportunity to discuss compelling challenges that banking industry is dealing with in the area of security and privacy, take a stock of the impact of these challenges on banking industry, interact with leaders with banking industry and security experts, and identify for means tackle the challenges and evolve consent on some of the overarching issues.