#IRMA2019: Key insights from ICICI Lombard’s ‘Managing New Age Risks’ survey.

Technology, as we know, has become an integral part of our business enterprises. Industrial Revolution 4.0 which connects physical devices with electronic devices comes with new kind of risks. As the world is getting increasingly interconnected, everyone shares the responsibility of securing our cyberspace. Adopting preventive measures and cyber risk mitigation tools has become the need of the hour.

ICICI Lombard, India’s leading private sector general insurance company has commissioned a PAN India survey titled ‘Managing New Age Risk’ to assess the preparedness of Indian organisations towards new age risks. A detailed feedback of CXOs from 100 companies across various sectors was taken for this research.

Corporate dependence on insurance to cover the risk of cyberattacks is expanding in line with their increasing reliance on tech for everything from invoicing to engaging consumers on social media. Next-gen technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Cloud, Blockchain, IoT etc. are associated with new age risks like cyberattacks, data theft, cloud hacks etc. India was the target of 17% cyberattacks, second only to US (38%) between 2015- 2017 as per report released by Symantec Corp. The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) reported 53,081 cases of cybercrime in the year 2017. More than 40,000 computers in India were jeopardised by Wannacry ransomware attack. Recently, a Pune-based co-operative bank lost nearly Rs 94 crores when hackers operating from abroad breached bank’s ATM servers.

As cyberattacks become more frequent and severe, the need for solid insurance coverage to plug potential financial losses is in demand.

ICICI Lombard’s ‘Managing New Age Risks’ survey delved into understanding the risks that Indian Inc. perceives as critical for business. It also looked at the role of insurers in managing risks from the lens of Indian firms. The survey findings were unveiled by Mr. Bhargav Dasgupta, MD and CEO, ICICI Lombard in the august presence of Prof. Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics & Public Policy at Harvard University and a former Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund.

The report highlights that companies still consider traditional risks as extremely crucial for their business. CXOs believed that assets like property, machinery and health & wellness of employees are pivotal risks and are needed to be insured. When asked about which risks have been gaining importance in the last 3 years, the response was clearly for new age risks such as hacking, data theft etc. 67% of India Inc. believes data thefts have increased substantially from the last 3 years, 63% feels that risks from cybercrime have increased substantially in the same period.

In terms of challenges to handle risks, 43% CXOs find new age risk incident to be unique, while 42% found it even difficult to identify the source of an attack, making it a tough task to manage. 21% company executives believed that new age risk incidents spread too fast, making it difficult for firms to handle them.

Lack of internal capabilities was a key takeaway when it came to preparedness of organisations in managing new age risks. 41% respondents believed that their existing systems were not equipped to handle these risks, while 39% respondents felt that there was a shortage of skilled manpower that could address these risks. 71% of respondents said that prevention of new age risks is the best way to deal with e-risks.

On the role of insurers, 81% companies believe that insurers are equipped to a certain extent in managing new age risks. Specifically, companies believe that insurers are better equipped to manage risks such as cloud computing (100%) and cyberattacks (69%). However, a majority of CXOs believe that e-risks like data thefts can be better managed internally.

“New age risks are already a reality today, globally and in India. It is most critical that Indian firms take cognizance of this aspect. As is evident from ‘Managing New Age Risks’ survey, being prepared and having the right risk management framework in place is the need of the hour. ICICI Lombard is partnering with their clients to ensure that they are equipped with appropriate and adequate ‘risk management and mitigation’ solutions to effectively handle any prospective new age risk incidents.” - Mr. Bhargav Dasgupta, MD & CEO, ICICI Lombard.

In the digital age, cyberattacks will face a sharp incline in the years to come. Corporates and Insurance companies will have to combine synergies to fight these new age cyber risks in the interest of customers.

- Chaitanya Kulkarni.

YES BANK Datathon unites professionals and academia to co-create next-gen data driven products.

Technology and Banking are no longer poles apart. Over the last few years, innovation in the fintech industry has taken the world by storm, becoming a global phenomena not limited to one region. The Asian fintech space was dominated by innovations from Indian and Chinese firms, especially from the new-age startups. Being a software superpower, Indian startups and MNCs are contributed immensely towards the development of innovative products and models.

This year, we all have witnessed the growth of game-changing technologies like UPI, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence and Open Banking. Global technology giants like Google, WhatsApp were wooed by the United Payments Interface, making India a top destination of digital payment adoption. Blockchain, which is also the underlying technology for all cryptocurrencies is implemented by banks to secure financial transactions.

Experts who have closely followed these trends believe that the next wave of fintech would be in the field of data science. YES BANK, India’s fourth largest private bank has been at the forefront for adopting next-gen technologies to service its customers better. YES BANK believes that the best of outcomes in the field of technology is received from the engineers and data scientists of tomorrow – the students. The idea generation from aspiring data scientist and its execution under the mentorship of CIOs and CTOs would be key in building scalable models in the data science ecosystem.

Data scientists, engineers, students from Top colleges, all compete at the Datathon.

Datathon, India’s first bank led Datathon collaborated aspiring data scientists and professionals from IT field to augment YES BANK’s 600 TB anonymized and embedded data stack to create new Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) prototypes in a period of just 100 days. In its inaugural season, more than 6000 aspiring data scientists/ engineers and developers joined this competitive initiative. The top teams include not only students from top technology institutes like the IITs, BITS, ISI Kolkata and University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka but also 150 plus professionals from top IT organisations.

Participants at Datathon got an opportunity to access unstructured and anonymised data on Cloudera and AWS dashboards. YES BANK had also onboarded a pool of 20+ data science experts and leaders across industries, to support the data science teams as well as to help the bank identify relevant use cases for product development using Big Data Analytics, AI and ML. After the detailed scrutiny of models, top 15 teams were invited to Bengaluru to present their models in front of esteemed panelists at Datathon Finale.

Data models developed during the Datathon were aimed at addressing the current business and service requirements. For instance, team Django Unchained has created an AI based application for sales representatives of the bank which enables them to measure share of wallet reserved for every retail customer, predict customer attrition and provide customized products to different classes of customer. Team Prayaas, a mix student team from NMIMS Mumbai and ISI Kolkata worked on a proactive model which predicts individual customer deliveries like cards, cheque books, statements by reducing human interference and service requests. Majority of models presented at Yes Datathon pointed towards improving customer satisfaction and reducing overheads; a facet of fintech.

And the winners are...

Oracle, a team of professionals from IBM and two students from IIM Bangalore bagged the top spot of Yes Datathon challenge. Team Oracle presented a ‘master product’ which creates a single 360 degree view of every retail customer. Upon analysis, the model provides customised product and service recommendations for every individual retail customer along with the resolution of pending service requests. Team Data Pros and Data Acers from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka were honoured with runners-up and Best Student Team (position) at Yes Datathon challenge.

YES BANK plans to deploy the selected data models in the real-time banking ecosystem by March 2019. YES BANK believes in the ideology of consistently adopting next-gen technologies to deliver superior products and services. Datathon is also actively partnering with top technology institutes, and has partnered with top IITs and BITS Pilani, and will also host AI/ML challenges and data engineering workshops to deepen practical and technical knowhow of future technology leaders and widen the data science ecosystem. Yes Datathon is a part of a long-term strategy of YES BANK of ‘becoming a technology company in the banking business’.

- Chaitanya Kulkarni.

Give your data the security it deserves

As per Global Information Security Survey 2016-17 by EY, 33% of Indian companies don’t have any Security Operations Center (SOC) as compared to 44% worldwide. Besides, 44% companies in our country don’t have any or minimum vulnerability identification capability.

India is at risk of cybercrimes and data breaches. And increasingly, the situation is getting worse. Recently, the food delivery app, Zomato, was affected by a major data breach incident, which resulted in the information theft of 7.7 million users. Over the past one year, our country has seen many data breach incidents, including Mirai botnet malware, Petya, and the most infamous, ransomware WannaCry.

Undoubtedly, it will be the job of a CISO to place the enterprise-level security agenda on the company’s priority list, communicate its urgency across organizations, drive various remedial programs, and most importantly, ensure the timely deployment of various security measures.

However, when it comes to cyber security, every employee should be responsible. Awareness is the key. Spreading awareness about enterprise-level security in particular and data security in general help dealing with cybercrimes.

Moving a step ahead, some organizations are promoting this issue on a massive level. For example, the latest campaign of Dell EMC on data security, #DataSuraksha. The campaign is getting enthusiastic participation from professionals across sectors and cities, even from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities. Some good ideas about data security which I found quite insightful include:

• Don't allow your app to access your phone contact book unless it's absolutely necessary.
• Automate end user backups, with multiversioning, whitelisted apps.
• Don’t allow the Internet Server remember passwords
• Use encryption technology and store data at several storage devices.

Going a step further, Dell EMC is also rewarding such great ideas with fascinating goodies. The campaign has already taken social media by storm to fulfill its objective. To know more about the campaign or participate in it, visit Dell EMC India’s Facebook and Twitter.

It’s time for all of us to do our bit and aim for a cyberthreat-free nation.