Financial Services
Zero Trust Access and Fraud Defense for Financial Services
- 01
Identify sensitive values
- 02
Replace with stable tokens
- 03
Restore only inside your boundary
01
Requirements reviewed with your team
02
Technical fit and integrations assessed
03
Pilot scope defined around measurable outcomes
How access and data actually move in a bank
A bank's traffic isn't one shape. Branch staff hit a core system whose architecture hasn't changed in fifteen years. Back-office teams reconcile in a browser against a SaaS ledger. An outsourced servicing vendor logs into a console through Citrix from another country. A quant pulls market data with a scripted collector. A support agent pastes a complaint transcript into a chatbot to summarize it.
Five paths, five owners, usually five controls. The VPN covers the first two badly and the third one worse. The fourth has no security owner at all until someone notices the collector's datacenter IP getting blocked. The fifth is invisible until a DLP alert or an audit finding.
That fragmentation is the problem, not any single control failing. Five logs, five vendors, and no single answer when a regulator asks who reached what, and what left.
Where financial services is actually exposed
Five failure modes specific to this environment, not a restatement of general security advice.
01
Third-party and outsourced access
Core banking vendors, BPO servicing teams, and collections agencies need a console, not a network. Most get a VPN account, a jump host, or a shared Citrix session, each granting far more reach than the contract does. DORA has applied since 17 January 2025 and expects a register describing what each ICT provider actually touches. Network access is a poor entry in that register.
02
Low-and-slow credential stuffing
Passwords reused from unrelated breaches get replayed against online banking and brokerage login from large residential proxy pools. Per-IP rate limits don't see it: each address makes two or three attempts and never returns. The fraud team learns about it at the password-reset or funds-movement step, which is late.
03
New-account and card-testing abuse
Onboarding and payment endpoints attract two different scripted behaviors: synthetic-identity applications that pass every field validation, and card-testing bursts probing stolen BINs with small authorizations. Both look like ordinary form submissions to a WAF rule.
04
Customer data in AI workflows
An analyst pastes a complaint transcript into a general chatbot to summarize it. It contains a full name, an account number, and a card's last four. That prompt now sits in a vendor's logs. No firewall saw it leave, because nothing about the request looked unusual.
05
Investigation from an attributable IP
A fraud analyst opens a suspected phishing kit, or a strategy team checks a competitor's rate card. Both go out from a bank-owned address block. That tells the operator on the other end exactly who is looking, and it changes what they get served.
Who this page is for
- CISO / Head of Security
- Owns the answer to what a compromised servicing vendor's laptop can reach.
- Fraud and financial crime
- Wants account takeover and new-account abuse caught before the loss is booked, not in the chargeback file.
- Data protection officer
- Has to say where customer PII goes when staff use AI tools, and prove it.
- Third-party risk
- Maintains the ICT register and has to describe each vendor's real access, not its network route.
- Platform and infrastructure
- Runs the VPN concentrators and the Citrix farm, and would like to run fewer of both.
How a team would actually run this
Retiring VPN access for an outsourced servicing team
- 01 Publish the servicing console and the two internal tools that team uses behind MaskFlare Access. Nothing moves and nothing is rewritten, because a connector fronts them where they already run.
- 02 Scope policy to the vendor's identity group, contracted hours, and device posture where the contract requires it.
- 03 Run it beside the existing VPN through the pilot window, so a mistake is not an outage.
- 04 Pull the VPN accounts once the console is verified. The third-party register now names three applications instead of network access.
Cutting off a distributed credential-stuffing run
- 01 Radar scores login attempts on behavior and device signal rather than request rate from one address.
- 02 Attempts that read as scripted, such as a replayed device fingerprint across unrelated accounts or no interaction before submit, get challenged. Ordinary logins are untouched.
- 03 The signal carries forward, so a successful login from a suspect session gets a second check at beneficiary change or funds movement.
- 04 Fraud receives the decision and the evidence in one record instead of reconstructing it afterward.
Letting analysts use AI on customer records
- 01 Traffic to approved AI tools routes through Vault, and prompts are scanned before they reach the model.
- 02 Account numbers, card PANs, names, and national IDs are replaced with stable tokens. An account reference stays the same token across the whole thread, so the answer still makes sense.
- 03 The response is re-identified inside your boundary. The vendor never held real values.
- 04 You keep a record of what was redacted, which is the artifact an examiner actually asks for.
Which modules apply, and why
Each links to the module page, where the boundaries and development status are set out in full. Or start at the MaskFlare platform overview.
Zero Trust & SASE
MaskFlare Access
Replaces VPN and shared jump hosts for staff, contractors, and outsourced servicing teams. Per-application, per-request, against your identity provider.
Bot & Fraud Defense
MaskFlare Radar
Scores login, onboarding, and payment endpoints for credential stuffing, account takeover, synthetic identity, and card testing.
Zero Trust & SASE
MaskFlare Vault
Redacts PII before a prompt reaches a model or a third-party API, and restores it inside your boundary.
Masking & Privacy
MaskFlare Cloak
Gives fraud and research teams a vantage point that isn't traceable to a bank-owned IP block.
Regulatory context
Readiness and relevance, not certification. Nothing here is a claim to hold an audit or authorization we do not have.
- PCI DSS
- Where MaskFlare sits in a payment path, we can document how data is handled and what is logged. We hold no attestation today.
- DORA (EU)
- Applies since 17 January 2025. In-scope entities register ICT third-party arrangements and describe what each provider touches. Per-application access makes that a list of applications rather than a subnet.
- GLBA Safeguards Rule (US)
- Access control, encryption, and monitoring of customer information. MaskFlare is a control you would cite, not a compliance product.
- SOC 2 / ISO 27001
- Roadmap, not achieved. We won't describe MaskFlare as audited until it is.
What MaskFlare does not do
- MaskFlare is pre-launch. Capabilities described here are in development, and pilot scope is agreed case by case.
- No SOC 2, ISO 27001, or PCI attestation today. The Trust Center carries current status.
- No payment-page script integrity monitoring, no core banking modernization, and no transaction-level AML screening. Those stay with your existing stack.
- No financial services customers to name yet. We'd rather say that than imply otherwise.
Four questions to ask any vendor here
Including us. If our answer is worse than someone else's, you should know that before a pilot, not during one.
- 01Can you grant a servicing vendor access to one console without placing them on a network segment? Ask to see the policy object, not the diagram.
- 02How does the bot control behave when each IP makes two attempts and disappears? If the answer is rate limiting, it will miss it.
- 03When a prompt is redacted, where does re-identification happen, in your cloud or ours? That answer decides whether the risk moved or went away.
- 04What is your audit status, in writing, with dates? Not bank-grade security.
Workflow guides for this industry
How a team applies each of these, including the contrast with the tool it replaces.
Definitions worth agreeing on first
Financial Services questions we get asked
Can MaskFlare replace our VPN for branch and back-office staff?
That's the intent, and the migration is meant to be incremental rather than a cutover. Access publishes applications one at a time and runs alongside the existing VPN until each is verified, which is how a bank avoids breaking remote access for everyone at once.
How does this catch credential stuffing spread across thousands of residential IPs?
By scoring behavior and device signal instead of request volume per address. A distributed run still shares characteristics across attempts, such as identical device fingerprints on unrelated accounts and submit timing no human produces. That is the signal Radar is built to score.
Where does PII redaction happen, and does the AI vendor ever see real customer data?
Detection and tokenization happen before the request leaves your boundary, and re-identification happens after the response comes back inside it. The model provider receives tokens. This is the central design question to ask any AI data protection vendor, including us.
Is MaskFlare PCI DSS certified?
No. We hold no PCI attestation, no SOC 2, and no ISO 27001 today. Those are roadmap items, and the Trust Center states current status rather than intent.
We're an EU entity in scope for DORA. Does MaskFlare help with the third-party register?
It changes what you write in it. Per-application access means a vendor entry describes the specific applications reached rather than a network range, which is closer to what the register is asking for. MaskFlare is not a compliance product and does not produce the register for you.
Can we pilot on one application before committing?
That is the only way we're running engagements right now. A pilot is scoped around one or two applications, or one endpoint for fraud scoring, with success criteria agreed before it starts.
Do you support contractors on unmanaged devices?
The intended path is browser-delivered access with no client on the contractor's machine, so an unmanaged laptop never joins your network. That capability is in development, and pilot scope depends on which applications you need it for.
Early customer program
We're looking for financial services teams with a specific exposure from the list above and a willingness to scope a pilot around one measurable outcome. Bring the constraint that makes it hard, because that is the part worth talking about.
Your next chapter starts here
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