Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Financial institutions rely heavily on third-party vendors like payment processors, banking platform providers and fintech integrations to maintain operational efficiency. In fact, according to Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, 30% of data breaches involved a third party, including vendors with direct remote access to financial systems. As environments become more distributed and accommodate remote work, managing vendor access has become a modern security challenge.

Ransomware and stolen credentials are among the most common and harmful attack vectors targeting financial institutions. Since banking systems store valuable financial assets and sensitive customer data, organizations must demonstrate strict control and oversight of privileged access to support regulatory and audit expectations under frameworks such as SOX, PCI DSS and GLBA.

To support enterprise workflows like monitoring systems, triaging support tickets, and automating routine work, AI agents need access to the same sensitive systems employees use, including databases, APIs, SaaS tools, and internal infrastructure. However, many of these systems still rely on shared passwords, API keys, tokens, and other credential-based access paths that are difficult to manage and control.

Most organizations already have the policies they need in place. The problem is enforcement.

Although Jira serves as the system of record for many DevOps and IT teams, retrieving secrets or approving requests for privileged information often occurs on other platforms. Teams may depend on external tools, email messages or Slack chats to manage credentials or elevation requests, leading to context switching, audit gaps and delays that increase operational risk.

Most organizations can tell you which apps sit behind SSO. Far fewer can tell you what other apps teams are using, or who has access to the credentials.

At 1Password, our mission is simple: to protect people’s most critical information, their credentials. At the time of writing this post, I personally have 291 items in my vault, so the long-term confidentiality of this data is critical to myself and every 1Password user. We are thrilled to announce the first major milestone in our post-quantum cryptography (PQC) journey, the successful deployment of PQC on 1Password’s web application.

Investment firms operate at the heart of global capital markets, managing assets, executing large volumes of transactions and relying on technology to transfer funds in real time. For all of this activity, investment firms rely on trading platforms, which are systems that route orders to alternative markets, analyze data, execute trades and measure performance across portfolios.