Concentric AI announced it is seeing significant customer traction in the financial services industry. The company uniquely addresses financial services organizations' data security needs with powerful deep learning technology that improves financial firms' data access and activity governance with unparalleled contextual understanding of structured and unstructured financial data, wherever it's stored on premises or in the cloud across various locations and branch offices.

Today financial services organizations face significant data security and access challenges protecting client personally identifiable information (PII), including bank account numbers and statements, credit card numbers and statements, and more. This is due to the vast amounts of PII stored on premises at various locations and branch offices and in the cloud, often with inappropriate and out-of-date access rights. In addition, financial organizations not only have their clients' data to keep safe, but their own intellectual property to protect.

With Concentric AI, financial services organizations can with a single deployment address their regulatory and security requirements around protecting their most sensitive financial, operational and customer data. Concentric AI's DSPM solution identifies any type of data that is accessible and assigns risk so financial organizations can ascertain the data type, who has access to it, whether it has the correct permissions, and if it has been shared appropriately inside or outside the organization. Discovery of the data type and risk profile are critical to understanding risk, and Concentric AI can also autonomously remediate issues and programmatically remove any unauthorized access to prevent data loss. 

For example, late last year a large credit union with 38 service locations and 34 member centers that serves more than 372,000 members deployed Concentric AI's Semantic Intelligence platform to protect its own and members' sensitive data on premises across locations and in the cloud. The credit union faced challenges around data classification, access and activity governance due to manual processes, and relying on the teams to input classification data. Today it benefits from Concentric AI's DSPM solution for autonomous data discovery, classification, risk monitoring, and remediation.

"We had tried to roll out our data security posture management program multiple different times using different products," stated the Principal IT Security Architect at the credit union. "They all failed based on the fact that they were all using regular expressions as a way of detecting the different categories of data we had. It didn't work. Concentric AI hit every single data category that we need to identify using AI, and that's the real benefit of the product. By using machine learning to go in and figure out the context and content of the data, and then to monitor and protect that data - that was absolutely spot-on and is working very well for us."

Concentric AI has a long history of working with financial services organizations and helping them secure their data. Recent real-world incidents where Concentric AI helped remediate and protect data in financial environments include:

• Risky sharing outside the company - An employee at a financial services firm shared sensitive finance intellectual property with a friend.
• Risky sharing to personal email - The CFO at a financial services company needed access at home and she sent the confidential 2023 budget to her Gmail account.
• Inappropriate classification - At another financial services firm, mortgage documents that were not classified were open to almost everyone in the IT department.
  

Concentric AI's DSPM solution scans financial services organizations' data, detects sensitive or business critical content, identifies the most appropriate classification category, and automatically tags the data. Concentric AI uses artificial intelligence (AI) to improve discovery and classification accuracy and efficiency to avoid endless regex rules and inaccurate end user labeling. In addition, Concentric AI can monitor and autonomously identify risk to financial and other data from inappropriate permissioning, wrong entitlements, risky sharing, and unauthorized access. It can automatically remediate permissions and sharing issues or leverage other security solutions and cloud APIs to quickly and continuously protect exposed data.

"We are seeing significant traction and interest in financial services, and are pleased to work with financial institutions of all sizes to address their data protection needs and improve their data security postures," said Karthik Krishnan, Founder and CEO, Concentric AI. "Few industries rely so heavily on customer loyalty like financial services - customer trust means everything and if it's lost, business suffers. Financial organizations turn to Concentric AI because our DSPM solution gives unprecedented visibility into their sensitive data across datasets and locations, as well as a consolidated view into the risk associated with inconsistent access privileges, permissions, activity, and location to protect their data from loss."

Concentric AI secures data-centric work using AI to protect business-critical financial information hidden in the millions of files and databases storing PII on premises across locations and in the cloud. The company's unique deep learning solution autonomously and accurately finds sensitive content, assesses risk, and remediates security issues, allowing financial services organizations for the first time to fully meet their data security needs.

Concentric AI's Semantic Intelligence automates unstructured and structured data security using deep learning to categorize data, uncover business criticality and reduce risk. Its Risk Distance analysis technology uses the baseline security practices observed for each data category to spot security anomalies in individual files. It compares documents of the same type to identify risk from oversharing, third-party access, wrong location, or misclassification. Financial organizations benefit from the expertise of content owners without intrusive classification mandates, with no rules, regex, or policy maintenance needed.