How robust is your WFH data security?

By Diego Diquattro, Chief Technical Officer, Visible Capital

How robust is your WFH data security?

In a government campaign in recent weeks, people in England will be encouraged to go back to the workplace. But with research by academics at Cardiff and Southhampton universities reporting that nine in 10 UK employees would like to continue working from home in some form, it is looking unlikely that office life will ever be the same again.

It certainly won’t for employees of FTSE 100 investment business Schroders, who announced that they are to allow thousands of staff to carry on working from home after the pandemic, with employees free to agree working patterns with their managers. And the accountancy company PricewaterhouseCoopers which employs 22,000 staff in the UK, is taking a similar course, recently predicting that the majority of employees will move to a more even split of home and office working on a permanent basis.

And it’s the same story closer to home, in the financial services world. The Financial Adviser reported that “flexible working is here to stay among the biggest advice players despite government guidance on working from home having changed this month.” And the publication quotes St James’s Place, Quilter, Ascot Lloyd and Fairstone as all offering ‘agile’ working as part of a phased return to the office.

But with this movement towards increased flexibility, there’s an urgent need for companies, whatever their size, to be aware of potential increased security risks. WFH can mean less reliance on secure intranet transference of documents, more emails pinging around the country on laptops and more duplication of email chains and attachments.

Anthony Rafferty, managing director of Origo, and recent headliner in our VCTV series of interviews, recently wrote in Professional Adviser that “areas of weakness have been compounded during the Covid-19 crisis as businesses have had to set up new ways of remote working at a pace which has not always allowed for cyber security arrangements to be put in place. If, as many predict, home working will become a greater part of the UK’s business operations post Covid too, ensuring robust data securing and secure communications will be essential for any company.”

At Visible Capital, we are working with our financial services clients to remove that security risk, ensuring that it will make no difference to the security of their customers’ data, whether they are working from home or in the office. Our wealth management tools use open banking platforms, allowing customers to provide their FA with all their personal, financial and transactional data, using a robustly secure online portal. No need for scanned IDs or copies of bank statements in the post, no need for emails and much less wriggle room for the cyber criminal. In fact, our open banking platform through which customers share their data with financial advisers, uses AES military-grade encryption or  an Advanced Encryption Standard with 256-bit keys. That’s considerably more robust than the better browsers people might use at home to log into their day-to-day online bank accounts which connect at 128-bit.

Schroders chef executive Peter Harrison was reported in The Telegraph as saying that the pandemic has pushed flexible working forward by 20 years. Our team at Visible Capital believe it’s never been more important to push data security forward by 20 years too.