UK banks are turning to expanding access to technology to rebuild customer trust and offer improved services. For example our client Barclays Bank is embarking on a major transformation programme that uses increased investment in technology to “create a much better customer and client experience at structurally lower cost, with better control and quality.”

As technology becomes more, not less pivotal, to how financial institutions function, providing access to employees and partners is becoming increasingly complex.

Banks like Barclays understand the risks but it’s important not to be complacent especially given what CISOs and CIOs are attempting to resolve. End users expect immediate access to resources in order to get their jobs done. As a result, IT is constantly hustling to provide access quickly to maximise productivity, especially within transformation plans focused on customer responsiveness.

As with most things in life, everything has a cost. While speed is imperative, providing improper or inaccurate access can impede business productivity and the organisation may be exposed to unnecessary or completely unforeseen risk.

To understand risk, banks and other financial organisations must first be aware of where threats exist by having visibility into the access granted, the resources and data behind this access, and how it is being used. In order to do so, IT must walk-through and review a mountain of data in multiple not necessarily integrated systems to find the answer.

So how do you ensure that users have appropriate access for their roles and that they are using those resources within governing policies? How do you easily and efficiently identify anomalies and outliers? How do you know which data points lead to risk when you must boil an ocean of big data to get to the answer?  How do you do all of this continuously and in real time to manage risk on an ongoing basis?

The answer lies in the Big Data inherent within IAM systems – Big Identity Data (BID). Harnessing Big Identity Data brings IAM technology to its next evolutionary state and provides unprecedented value when applied correctly. The only way for banks to do this is to use a powerful analytical tool. It’s vital that these companies can aggregate billions of data points, apply analytics, visualise risk and then act on that information, not only to remediate at a single point in time, but also to improve ongoing processes or operations to prevent similar risks from occurring in the future.

In the coming months, you’ll hear more about the ‘next generation’ of IAM, intelligent IAM. Thanks to Big Identity Data, provisioning can be more informed by the existing activities and access in the organisation and banks can maintain compliance continuously, not just at individual points in time.

The result? More efficient IT operations and streamlined audits, which in turn will lead to more efficient banking.