Jenn Nuttall | Product Marketing Manager
Over the past ten years, banking and financial institutions worldwide have undergone a significant digital revolution. Innovative technologies have transformed payment transactions, banking processes, and even investments, leading to a shift toward digital formats. While the digital world and the cloud provide numerous benefits for banks and their customers, digitized financial institutions face evolving security and compliance challenges. These challenges demand new approaches to safeguarding critical systems and data. NCC Bank, a prominent and reputable bank in Bangladesh, relies on Thales Luna Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) to meet new government requirements and maintain seamless and secure customer interactions.
The challenge: Compliance, security, and customer experience
Recently, the government of Bangladesh launched the Interoperable Digital Transaction Platform (IDTP) initiative, known as Binimoy, which mandates all bank accounts, mobile financial services, and payment system providers to be interoperable. This move is expected to enable customers to transfer money in real-time and at lower costs within the financial sector, leading to a significant increase in cashless transactions.
Meeting the requirements of the new IDTP project posed several challenges and complexities. For instance, banking and financial institutions had to ensure end-to-end security with multi-factor authentication, a hardware-based root of trust for cryptographic operations and keys, and immutable record-keeping with audit logs. Besides these security requirements, banks had to ensure that the new measures would not affect customer experience by adding unnecessary complexity.
NCC Bank has always prioritized customer experience since its establishment in 1985. The bank has built a strong reputation for delivering personalized and excellent services to its customers by utilizing the latest technologies. In light of the IDTP requirements, NCC Bank recognized the opportunity to provide seamless, secure, and interoperable products and services across Bangladesh to ensure customer satisfaction. After a thorough evaluation process, NCC Bank chose Thales to assist them with the IDTP initiative.
How Thales benefits NCC Bank
Thales Luna HSMs have been deployed for cryptographic operations, secure key generation, and storage in many financial institutions around the globe, owing to their proven robust operational capabilities. Thales HSMs have gained end-user trust to ensure an unhindered but secure transaction flow.
The IDTP initiative in Bangladesh relies on crypto operations to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of all transactions. Thales Luna HSMs are FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified with a unique keys-in-hardware approach to ensure the keys are always secure, offering a secure communication channel between the HSM and the banking applications which results in encrypted and trusted transactions that meet the highest level of security.
Thanks to their efficient setup and administration, adding Thales Luna HSMs to the existing NCC Bank infrastructure was smooth and seamless. The overall security architecture protects cryptographic keys and sensitive data based on tamper-resistant hardware, multi-factor authentication, and secure key delivery. Thales Luna HSMs are scalable, flexible, and crypto agile to handle multiple applications with different crypto requirements. Crypto agility is also a great advantage since NCC Bank can become ready for future quantum-resistant encryption algorithms today.
Thales Luna HSMs are available in multiple models and form factors to meet customer needs. They can also be used on-premises, in the cloud, or across hybrid environments, making them the ideal choice to support digital transformations.
Banks and financial institutions can reduce risk and create a competitive advantage using Thales Luna HSMs as a strong anchor of trust in a digital world. To learn more about how Thales helped secure digital transactions of NCC Bank in Bangladesh, download the case study.