Defending against financial cyber threats has often been compared to an ongoing war on multiple fronts, where the battle tactics, weapons and even the adversaries keep shifting. And Deborah Guild knows this battlefield and its challenges all too well.
As the head of technology for PNC Bank, Guild has seen the "complexity of attacks against the sector and our customers" rapidly increase for the more than three decades that she herself has been working at the intersection of banking and technology.
With attackers pivoting from trying to penetrate banking systems themselves to luring customers with increasingly deceptive emails, phone calls, texts and fake websites,
To that end, Guild has reached out within the financial industry, partnering with government agencies and mobile carriers to help limit the threats that get through and stop as many as they can. "It's critical that we monitor the evolution of tactics and determine the best ways to defend against nation-state threat actors, cyber criminals, insiders and hacktivists," she said.
This outward-looking strategy has led to the Pittsburgh-based superregional's involvement with industry groups including the Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council, on which Guild currently serves as chair. The nonprofit council works with a wide swath of government agencies and financial regulatory bodies and law enforcement agencies to tackle overarching cybersecurity issues.
In the past year, the FSSCC partnered with the U.S. Treasury and the Financial and Banking Information Infrastructure Committee to map out how to "safely implement cloud." It has also built a library of information and tools to "help aid banks along that journey," she said. In addition, the council is working with the U.S. Treasury in promoting its Project Fortress, Treasury's largest public-private partnership to date for improving security and resilience of the financial services industry.
"This collaboration not only strengthens protections for the financial services industry as a whole, but it helps to extend those protections to our smaller counterparts that are heavily reliant on that partnership," said Guild.
Cyber threats aside, Guild said that the past year has been "particularly challenging" due to a combination of economic uncertainty, the interest rate environment and regulatory pressures. Adding AI into the mix — which is "lending both anxiety and excitement to the financial sector" — makes strategizing tricky, she said.
Throughout her career, Guild has supported and promoted women throughout her organization and the industry in general. As a board member for the National Center for Women & Information Technology, she has been instrumental in encouraging women and minorities to pursue computer science. Nearly half of Guild's leadership team is female.
"The simple act of telling women who have the prospect of a great career that they are good at it and should stick with it has an enormous effect on them and increases their probability of staying in the sector," Guild said. "Encouragement and community are incredibly strong factors women consider when they are at a crossroads in their life or career."
