Four Best Practices to Help Bank Boards Manage New Cybersecurity Guidance

Updates to the FFIEC Management Booklet portion of the IT Examination Handbook in late 2015 have placed your board of directors under more pressure than ever to ensure the health and stability of your institution’s overall IT and cybersecurity environment.

While the board has always held ultimate responsibility for institutional governance, the revised handbook places extra demands on their level of knowledge and involvement, particularly in the areas of cybersecurity, examination procedures and IT management.

It’s perhaps the IT management portion and its two major changes that will prove most taxing to board members. First, the description of the IT management structure is more granular, with the addition of two new parties: executive management and a chief information security officer. Specifically, executive management is expected “to understand at a high level the IT risks faced by the institution and ensure those risks are included in the institution’s risk assessments. In the event that executive management is unable to implement an objective or agree on a course of action, executive management should escalate that matter to the board for more guidance.” The chief information security officer’s duties are spelled out in depth, and the guidance requires that person to report directly to the board, a committee of the board, or senior management—but not to someone in IT. The board is responsible for implementing this new governance structure.

Secondly—and of more concern—the updated guidance requires board members to provide “credible challenges” to bank management before approving IT or security decisions. This means they must maintain enough understanding of IT and cybersecurity matters to ascertain how these decisions might pose risks to the institution and whether they align with its overall strategy. And if they don’t understand something, they must be able to ask thoughtful, intelligent questions until they do.

Now, as most of us know, it isn’t uncommon for board members to “rubber stamp” IT management decisions, sending approvals through with a modest amount of consideration. So, given their accountability for understanding these matters before signing off on them, how can you help your board succeed?

It helps to view this challenge as a two-way street: the board provides oversight and governance, and the bank’s management and subject matter experts (SMEs) share their knowledge and information with board members to help them carry it out. There are four best practices to accomplish this task:

1. Request that bank management, as well as the IT and security departments, begin passing relevant information to the board. Specifically, this includes monthly or quarterly summaries of incident reports that can apprise the board of any major incidents involving downtime, deployment of business continuity plans or anything else that could affect business decisions.
2. Have your bank’s IT and security SMEs—or possibly an outside firm—provide the board with continuous updates on regulators’ expectations surrounding cyber risk management and oversight, as well as which high-level risks are circulating in the current environment. The experts also can consult with board members about why this knowledge is important, and how they can incorporate it into their strategic decisions.
3. Encourage the board members to actively educate themselves by doing their own reading and research. To that end, ask one or two members to sit in on IT or security steering committees, then take the information they learn back to the rest of the board. This gives them access at the ground level.
4. Invite the board to get involved with the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), which shares the latest threat intelligence and attack methods, and encourages its financial industry members to do the same. If your institution has a membership—and it should—board members can access those resources and take part in the center’s bi-weekly conference calls.

Again, board members don’t have to become overnight SMEs. But they need to be involved, engaged and ready to ask some tough questions to ensure IT and security strategies are aligned with board expectations and the risk appetite they’ve set. If not, they shouldn’t be voting to approve IT plans.

After all, when it comes to IT, you can have all the best technology in the world, but if it’s unreliable or exposes your bank to too much risk, what good is it? It’s within the best interest of your institution and its board of directors to carefully apply the updated FFIEC guidance to all IT and security decisions.