Finance leaders sit at the frontline of digital risk because attackers follow the money. Strong governance and controls protect cash, data and reputation while supporting growth. Treat security as a capability – measurable, budgeted and tested. The aim is a resilience that limits blast radius, restores operations, and satisfies regulators and insurers.

Make Risk a Finance Metric

Tie cyber exposure to cash impact, downtime and regulatory penalties. Require risk registers, scenario analyses and ownership at board level. Align control investment with loss avoidance and audit requirements.

Tighten Controls Where Money Moves

Focus on payment change requests, treasury workflows and privileged access. Enforce out-of-band approvals, least privilege, and role separation. Mandate phishing-resistant authentication for finance systems and verify suppliers before updates. Record calls and verify voices where deepfakes threaten.

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Harden the Workforce and Stack

People remain prime targets, especially through social engineering and deepfakes. Schedule short, frequent training with realistic simulations and publish simple response playbooks. Patch quickly, segment networks, monitor anomalies, and back up critical data offline.

Expect cloud and SaaS sprawl. Standardise build templates and log retention so investigations are possible.

Prepare, Drill, and Recover

Tabletop ransomware, business email compromise and supplier outage scenarios. Rehearse legal, financial, customer and media actions with clear thresholds for escalation. Pre-approve emergency payments, pre-agree banking contacts, and validate restoration priorities.

Measure mean time to detect, respond and recover, then improve. Confidence comes from repetition, documentation and accountable leadership.