IT Essentials: Finance

9th June 2025

Having all that money in the bank doesn’t mean anything if the right people can’t access it or the wrong people can: what measures do finance companies use to keep systems running smoothly?

Unless you store all your money in cash, maybe under your mattress, chances are that you use keep most of your funds in a back account. But what key technologies are financial institutions using to keep your money secure while also ensuring you can access it when you need to? Let’s take a look:

Infrastructure: like any other modern business, financial institutions need reliable broadband, with an emphasis on networks that are available 24/7 and private clouds to keep sensitive information secure. Additionally, disaster recovery needs to be a priority to reduce downtime.

Core Financial Systems: these systems are unique to the finance industry, like banking systems, trading platforms, payment and processing systems and treasury management systems. They allow staff to manage accounts, data and investments.

Customer-Facing Technology: this is anything a customer might interact with including online/mobile banking platforms, chatbot assistants and a secure messaging system. Ideally, all of these should be simple to access and use, should run efficiently and should be kept secure from cyber-attack.

Cyber Security: perhaps the most important element of finance in IT, cyber security should be layered and complex. Being such an inviting target for cyber criminals means that firewalls, encryption, multi-factor authentication and much more needs to be in place to prevent the chance of a breach. Additionally, staff and customers alike need to be trained to spot cyber attacks before they happen.

IT Support: we’ve seen it happen before – when a bank is a victim of a cyber-attack or system failure it may prevent users from being able to access their accounts. To prevent this downtime, companies either use an internal team or external managed service provider, to ensure they are back and working again as fast as possible.

Money makes the world go round – that may be true, but without these and countless other IT processes keeping things safe and secure, people would be unable to use their funds.

If you work in the finance industry or not, we’d be happy answer any questions: contact Interfuture Systems HERE.