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24/06/2026 9:26 pm
TL;DR: Financial services face a $4.5 million average breach cost, and the article argues that unmanaged NHIs, over-permissive service accounts, automated pipelines, and third-party access expand both attack surface and compliance risk, according to Entro Security. The core issue is not visibility alone, but whether IAM, PAM, rotation, and lifecycle controls can actually govern machine access at scale.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Entro Security: NHI Security Challenges in Financial Services
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams inventory and govern non-human identities in financial services?
A: They should maintain a live inventory that includes every API key, token, service account, certificate, and system account, plus ownership, purpose, scope, and rotation state.
Q: Why do service accounts create so much risk in regulated environments?
A: Service accounts often carry broader privileges than users because they must run unattended across systems, but that broad access becomes dangerous when credentials are stale, unowned, or rarely reviewed.
Q: What do organisations get wrong about third-party machine access?
A: They often treat third-party connectivity as a setup task instead of a governed lifecycle.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory all NHIs as governed assets Create a single inventory for API keys, OAuth tokens, service accounts, certificates, and system accounts.
- Reduce standing privilege in service accounts and pipelines Replace broad machine permissions with task-scoped entitlements, especially for CI/CD, GitOps, and production integration identities.
- Tie third-party access to offboarding and rotation rules Require explicit revocation steps when a vendor relationship changes, and ensure shared integrations have documented rotation and evidence capture.
What's in the full article
Entro Security's full blog covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Examples of adaptive authentication criteria for non-human identities in financial services
- Step-by-step guidance on federated identity management for machine-to-machine integrations
- SOAR-oriented incident response and forensics workflows for exposed NHIs and secrets
- Rotation, vaulting, and lifecycle management detail for API keys and OAuth tokens
👉 Read Entro Security's analysis of NHI security challenges in financial services →
Financial services NHI risk: where IAM and PAM controls slip?
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25/06/2026 6:40 am
Financial services exposes the identity governance problem most clearly when machine access outgrows human oversight. The article shows that APIs, service accounts, and automated processes are not edge cases in financial services, they are the operating model. That means the security challenge is less about whether NHIs exist and more about whether governance can keep pace with their volume, privilege, and external dependencies. Practitioners should read this as a signal that machine identity is now core infrastructure, not an auxiliary control layer.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, with 46% confirmed, 26% suspected, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
- Enterprises that have experienced a compromised NHI averaged 2.7 separate incidents in the past 12 months, which suggests repeated exposure rather than isolated failure.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should own NHI risk when APIs, IAM, and compliance overlap?
A: Ownership should sit with the identity or security function that can coordinate inventory, access review, rotation, and audit evidence across teams. Financial institutions need a named control owner because NHI risk crosses IAM, application, operations, and compliance boundaries, and gaps tend to appear where no single team is accountable.
👉 Read our full editorial: NHI security challenges in financial services need stricter governance
