Focus on Funds

Learn How to Protect Against Cyberthreats

Protecting information resources has always been an essential part of the fund industry. The June 2, 2016, edition of Focus on Funds outlines ICI and ICI Global’s latest efforts on this important topic, while providing details on an upcoming London conference.

Transcript

Stephanie Ortbals-Tibbs, ICI Director, Media Relations: ICI continues to ramp up its work on cybersecurity on behalf of the fund industry worldwide, including with an important upcoming event in London designed to help risk, compliance, and legal professionals with their increasing responsibilities in this area. Here is what I learned about this event, and all of our ongoing activity.

Peter Salmon, ICI Senior Director, Operations and Technology: This isn’t a technology conference. It’s really made for compliance staff, risk staff, internal audit, and fund trustees, so they can take something away from the event, bring it back to their shops, and actually implement it. They also can network with peers and establish some contacts that they may otherwise not have.

This risk area impacts many different functions within an organization. They all sort of look at it from a slightly different perspective. So, where we have committees of information security professionals in the United States and in Europe, where they can interact with their peers and share information, we feel that it’s really important to extend that body of knowledge beyond those individuals, as I said, to compliance, risk, internal audit, and fund trustees, so that they know what questions to ask, they know what their peers are doing, and what their peers are seeing.

Ortbals-Tibbs:You’ve recently done some work in Asia. Can you tell us about that?

Salmon: We’ve tried to expand that model into Japan and into the rest of Asia, and we had a very successful seminar in Japan where we got law enforcement involved, and I had a discussion with them for about 150 asset managers, covering this threat area and this risk for everyone. And we did a very similar event in Hong Kong. We hope to expand that to other nations in Asia as well.

Ortbals-Tibbs:And as part of that work, you also continue to build a really strong set of connections between our members and some of the law enforcement officials in those various communities, so that they have a standing relationship.

Salmon: It’s incredibly important to have that relationship before something goes wrong. These are the individuals who will probably do the investigation when something goes wrong, and so not calling them during an emergency is much preferable. So, we establish that relationship ahead of time, and they’ll explain to our members what their capabilities are and what’s entailed in an investigation, so there are no surprises, and our members get to explain their business and why it’s important that law enforcement know about them as well.

Additional Resources

• Register Now: 2016 Global Cybersecurity Forum
• ICI Information Security Resource Center
• ICI Viewpoints: Cybersecurity at Work: Exercise Is Important
• Video: With Cyberthreats, Preparation and a Quick Response Are Key