Financial Services Tips for Securing Email
Although email is one of the primary digital channels for customer interaction within financial services institutions, it has never been secure. Today, with phishing more common than ever, anyone can spoof your brand and leverage it to hijack sensitive information from your customers. Phishing has played a role in almost every type of cybercrime. In fact, some of the most widespread data breaches started with fraudulent email messages. Building trust with your customers takes time, but in a matter of hours, cybercriminals can betray that trust by taking advantage of your customers and damaging your reputation.
Cybercriminals have fine-tuned their spoofing techniques by improving the quality of the message and using sophisticated graphics and logos, their emails look authentic, creating a high likelihood that customers will open them. On average, 30% of recipients open fraudulent emails, while 11% click on attachments. Of those who open the email, 50% click on the link within an hour after it was sent. With this type of rapid, widespread acceptance, time is not on your side when it comes to detecting and reacting to phishing attacks.
It’s no surprise that financial companies and banks have become prime targets for phishing attacks. When criminals pretend to be a trusted brand, they choose a bank or electronic payments service 64% of the time. Although customers are recouped for financial losses after an attack, finance companies need to make up for those losses in some way. This can take the form of higher fees and interest rates, which can eventually lead to increased customer attrition.
The stakes are high and the long term costs are real. With 400 different brands targeted every quarter, 50% of which are newly targeted, it’s only a matter of time before your company faces an attack. It’s estimated that the damage caused by phishing campaigns amounts to 1.5 billion dollars per year. According to Google, the average CTR of a phishing campaign is almost 14%, far higher than many actual marketing campaigns.
By improving the quality of the message and using more sophisticated graphics and logos, phishing emails look authentic, creating a high likelihood that customers will open them.
– John Wilson, Field CTO
After the damage is done, what happens to your reputation? In today’s digital world, unhappy customers can easily make their voices heard, posing a huge risk to your business reputation and bottom line. 42% of consumers are less likely to do business with you following an email attack whether they were actually effected by the spoofed emails or not. In addition, 40% of consumers alter their online behavior due to safety concerns, which reduces their level of trust and engagement in future email communications.
Today, companies don’t have visibility into who’s sending emails and are often helpless to stop them. However, with Agari DMARC Protection you gain unprecedented visibility and the ability to control your email ecosystem using minimal resources to manage your email vendors and email streams. Agari customers get real-time threat intelligence, interactive and schedulable reports and alerts based on certain conditions impacting your brand. Once you clean up your email ecosystem, all email will be properly authenticated and spoofed messages will no longer reach their intended victims.
Agari secures the email channels for 6 of the top 10 globally recognized banks. When you secure your email, you secure your revenue, increase customer confidence and reduce service costs.