Long gone are the days when the average person was distrustful of carrying out any kind of financial transaction online (online banking). Luckily, over the years, e-commerce and online business activities have continued to grow.

However, there are still certain obstacles.  While users have gotten used to shopping online, there is one kind of digital transaction that is falling behind due to the fact that many people have misgivings about it: online banking.

45% worry about cybersecurity

This is has been revealed in the study Payments Fraud and Control Survey Report, carried out by JP Morgan Chase. The report is based on a survey of corporate practitioners in all kinds of companies in the US, and shows that 45% of said corporate practitioners show certain doubts regarding the cybersecurity risks that could affect online banking operations or B2B payments. In fact, this is the main reason that this type of platform isn’t growing as fast as could be expected.

Though we could talk about unjustified technophobia from these professionals, the truth is that most of them have certain grounds to be mistrustful. As the study reveals, 77% of those surveyed have been victims of the famous BEC scam or the CEO fraud, an illegal practice where an employee with access to the company’s funds receives an email from a director, asking for an urgent transfer. This is a fraud, since the sender of the email is someone external to the company; but by the time the employee realizes, it’ll be too late. This practice is as illegal as it is successful. In fact, BEC scams became the most lucrative cybercrime of 2017.

Those surveyed are in no doubt: while they would like to make greater use of online banking services and B2B platforms, they are concerned about the cybersecurity of their finances and of the payments carried out in this way.

The key: cybersecurity policies and solutions

Companies cannot remain idle with regards to this problem, nor simply hope that it will eventually sort itself out.  As such, financial institutions and online transaction platforms must guarantee potential customers the confidence they need in order to increase the adoption of their services.

In order to do this, they must bolster their companies’ corporate cybersecurity, especially in three main areas:

1.- Strategy. Companies need to position corporate cybersecurity as one of their central strategic pillars. It’s not enough for IT security to be a necessary supplement: it must be integrated into the essential points of their business model.

2.- Policy. Corporations must also establish cybersecurity policies. As well as affecting the technical operation of the company, these policies also need to reach the employees themselves, making sure they’re aware of how important it is to ensure that the company’s security is never compromised.

3.- Solutions. Finally, every company, independent of its sector or even its size, must adopt and implement cybersecurity solutions to improve the reliability of its system. To do so, they may turn to external specialized cybersecurity companies that know how to establish security measures to stop all sorts of problems for occurring.

One of these is Panda Adaptive Defense, Panda Security’s corporate cybersecurity solution, that acts both preventively and reactively. The solution monitors all movements within the company’s systems and detects any potential cybersecurity breaches. This means it is even capable of preventing cyberattacks before they happen, and of getting ahead of the cyberattackers. What’s more, it protects the company’s IT security after a possible intrusion, thus minimizing and eliminating possible damages.

And the fact is that these days, thanks to a collective effort, the average user now trusts online platforms for their financial transactions. So now the ball is in the companies’ court: they must restore user trust by providing secure, cyberattack-proof IT systems. And banks must be the first to ensure financial cybersecurity in all their operations.