As we progress toward integrating digital banking as part of our customer offering, data protection remains crucial. Managing cyber security risks and protecting customer privacy is fundamental to ensuring our customers can trust us with their confidential information. This is reinforced by our commitment to transparency around how data is collected, used and stored.
Banking organisations face rising operational risk from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. This stems from an increased reliance on technology to do business. We are continuing our focus on cyber security as the breadth of data under our governance increases. We have improved our in-house capability through focused development of our core cyber security business processes, research and development activities.
We have strengthened our cyber security function through implementing enhancements to our ‘detect and respond’ capabilities. Auswide Bank’s cyber governance framework ensures cyber related issues and risks are constantly monitored using efficient and effective treatment plans.
Our performance in cyber security is measured by monitoring the number of attempted and failed cyber attacks on our business. This includes regular authorised simulated cyber attack testing to assess the effectiveness of our controls and to identify areas for further development.
We work closely with cyber security service providers, industry leading threat intelligence partners and security teams from other financial services organisations to keep abreast of trends related to cyber criminal activities.
We are committed to respecting the privacy of our customers’ personal data and our privacy policy explains how we collect, store, use and disclose personal information and how we comply with privacy laws.
In order to protect this information Auswide Bank has in place physical security measures, and uses appropriate technology, processes and security to restrict access to this sensitive data.
In the event of a privacy breach, our processes ensure these risks are managed in a timely and effective way. As part of regular communications to customers our focus is ongoing education on the privacy risks arising from scams and identity fraud.
Empowering customers with their own data, Open Banking is an important element of the Australian Government Consumer Data Right (CDR) legislation passed by the Australian Government back in 2017. Under the Open Banking system customers are able to direct their bank to share their data with other banks and non-bank financial service providers.
The aim of open banking is to empower customers to use their data to make better decisions and find the best products and services to suit their needs. For Auswide Bank customers we continue to meet the requirements of being a data holder. This supports our customers’ authorising the sharing of their data with accredited data recipients.
Auswide Bank recognises the need for a robust prudential and regulatory environment ensuring a resilient, stable and growing Australian banking industry.
We operate under a comprehensive Regulatory Reporting & Data program. This ensures timely, accurate and comprehensive data to meet all our prudential and other regulatory obligations through regular reporting to financial regulators, including the ACCC, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (Austrac) and the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA).
The foundation of all activity listed above is ensuring data is trusted, which is core to Auswide Bank’s Data Strategy. We continue to invest across prioritised data activity, with priority determined by data roles (Data Owners and Data Stewards) that sit throughout the group.
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