In 2016, Wells Fargo faced a $185 million penalty—the largest ever imposed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at the time—for creating millions of unauthorized customer accounts. The fallout included the dismissal of 5,300 employees and the replacement of the chief risk officer. This scandal highlighted a significant risk management failure, driven by an overly aggressive sales incentive program that encouraged illegal practices. Wells Fargo’s negligence in managing these risks led to severe consequences.
The Wells Fargo scandal raised a critical question: Why didn’t risk assessments flag the faulty incentive program? The takeaway is clear: Security and C-suite leaders must prioritize risk management. Effective assessments can identify flaws in internal processes, investments, and partnerships, enabling preventative action. Had such measures been in place, Wells Fargo might have revised its incentive program and avoided the crisis altogether.
However, not all risk management strategies are equal. Traditional systems, reliant on historical data and static assessments, fail to address the dynamic threat landscape of 2024. These outdated methods often overlook emerging or “hidden” threats, leaving organizations vulnerable to unforeseen risks.
The need for effective risk management is undeniable, but modern, risk and threat detection solutions are now available to address these challenges.
The Power of Real -Time Threat Detection
Real-time threat detection provides a significant competitive advantage and is an essential capability for organizations. By analyzing data and identifying risks as they arise, organizations can respond proactively, implementing mitigation strategies before emerging threats escalate into critical issues.
There are several benefits to real-time detection:
- Proactive Risk Mitigation: Real-time analysis enables early identification of emerging threats, reducing the window of vulnerability and allowing organizations to act before threats fully materialize.
- Deeper Understanding of Evolving Risk Factors: Constant, real-time monitoring helps organizations stay up to date on the latest risk trends and rapidly evolving geopolitical and economic factors that might not have been visible using static assessments.
- Swift and Effective Responses: Real-time threat detection platforms like Seerist are designed to reduce false positives by using advanced AI and ML algorithms. This ensures that organizations focus on genuine threats rather than wasting time and resources investigating inaccurate or irrelevant alerts.
Seerist’s Augmented Analytics Approach
Seerist is a comprehensive platform that transforms how organizations forecast, detect, analyze, and respond to emerging risks. They don’t simply monitor data, but have the technology and expertise to uncover emerging threats through advanced analytics and AI-driven insights. This happens by combining the speed and efficiency of technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) with human expertise for contextualization.
More specifically, Seerist uses AI and ML algorithms to continuously process and analyze vast amounts of data – across social media outlets, news channels, and the dark web – identifying potential risks at scale. Seerist’s global team analysts work alongside the AI-lead technology to provide contextual insights, ensuring that real-time data is interpreted within the broader geopolitical, economic, and security landscapes.
Benefits of Real-Time Threat Detection
Real-time threat detection is a must for organizations looking to avoid disruption. A few benefits realized from this strategy include:
- Increased Operational Resilience and Preparedness. Organizations equipped with real-time threat detection can build more resilient operations, quickly adapting to unforeseen disruptions and minimizing downtime.
- Improved Decision-Making. Actionable intelligence derived from real-time data empowers decision-makers to make informed, timely choices that reduce risk exposure and capitalize on emerging opportunities.
- Reduced Potential for Disruptive Events. Real-time detection reduces costly and damaging disruptions and helps organizations avoid cyberattacks and learn about political crises so they can adjust operations as needed, such as closing locations that might be in the midst of protests, redirecting supplies to facilities that won’t be interrupted, and so on.
- Enhanced Ability to Capitalize on Emerging Opportunities. Real-time monitoring not only helps mitigate risks but also allows organizations to identify and leverage emerging opportunities in volatile markets or sectors.
Proactive Risk Management – A Must for Savvy Organizations
There is no doubt that proactive risk management is a must. Leaders who adopt this mindset and ensure its practice is part of organizational culture will be ones who most often avoid catastrophic events and keep people, assets, and operations safe in the face of disruptive events. A key tactic in proactive risk management is real-time threat detection, which ensures security teams and leaders are kept informed of potential events. Knowing what risks may be happening in the future allows decision makers to set up proper mitigation and contingency plans. This way, when a disruption occurs, there is no delay in reactions. Teams know what to do and hopefully can keep all necessary business processes moving along without disruption or costly damage control.
The most effective proactive approaches leverage technology, such as AI and ML, to provide accurate intelligence. There is simply no competing with the speed in which machines can search, sort, and track information. And the technologies only continue to evolve for the better – becoming smarter, faster, and better at forecasting suspicious activity based on emerging trends and patterns. In the future security teams may even have the option of using AI-driven autonomous response systems that mitigate risk without human intervention. That said, it remains imperative for experts to monitor technology. They are the ones to verify the accuracy of information, ensure the technology isn’t relying on false information or dis information, and that a variety of vetted sources are being accessed.
Seerist is at the forefront of proactive risk detection – using the most advanced technology in its solution, and partnering with risk and security intelligence experts from around the globe to verify intelligence and offer context to the data. Working with Seerist guarantees that an organization will not make the same missteps as Wells Fargo did. Seerist helps organizations work smarter to identify, understand, and respond quickly to threats with more accuracy and confidence than ever before. Curious as to how Seerist might benefit your organization? Let’s set up a demo!
