Securing Non-Human Identities in Financial Services

Read full article here: https://www.oasis.security/blog/securing-non-human-identities-for-financial-services/?source=nhimg

As financial institutions accelerate digital transformation, Non-Human Identities (NHIs), service accounts, APIs, bots, workloads and AI-driven processes are rapidly outpacing human accounts. These machine identities power critical functions like blockchain operations, open banking integrations, and automated data exchanges. However, their mismanagement through unrotated secrets, overprivileged access, and misconfigurations is becoming one of the fastest-growing security risks in the financial sector.

The Rising Risk Landscape

Financial services operate in high-stakes environments where data integrity, availability, and confidentiality are paramount. Compromised NHIs can lead to catastrophic breaches, regulatory violations, and loss of customer trust. Recent incidents involving Microsoft AI and Cloudflare highlight how attackers exploit poorly secured NHIs to gain unauthorized access to sensitive environments.

Challenges with Traditional IAM

Legacy Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems were designed for human users and often lack the automation, visibility, and policy enforcement capabilities needed for modern NHI governance. As a result, financial organizations face blind spots in monitoring, secret rotation, and least-privilege enforcement across multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-premises systems.

The Strategic Imperative: Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM)

To mitigate risk, financial institutions must implement a comprehensive NHIM framework that:

• Discovers & inventories all NHIs across environments for full visibility.

• Automates lifecycle management including provisioning, rotation, and decommissioning.

• Enforces least privilege to limit NHI access strictly to what is required.

• Integrates with compliance mandates like PCI DSS, SOC 2, and open banking standards.

• Implements continuous monitoring and anomaly detection to spot compromised NHIs before damage occurs.

Conclusion

In financial services, NHIs represent a new security perimeter that demands the same, if not greater, protection as human identities. Proactive NHI governance is not simply a compliance exercise; it’s a business continuity and trust mandate in an era where automation drives the industry. By investing in purpose-built NHIM solutions, institutions can close critical security gaps, meet regulatory expectations, and secure the trust of clients and partners in a rapidly evolving threat landscape.