The $1.6 billion Progress Bank will manage its cybersecurity services and network operations by outsourcing them to SEI, a provider of wealth and investment management solutions.

IT Officer Greg Jones, of Progress Bank, said the financial institution was among the first to pilot the service with SEI and signed on formally after the proof of concept. Outsourcing will allow Progress, which is based in Huntsville, Ala., to automate its security without in-house expertise, Jones added.

“You can be compliant, but not be secure, so my focus has always put security first and compliance will fall into place,” Jones said. “There were a lot of things we wanted to address, but … we don’t have the size and capacity to do all that in-house.”

Among the functions SEI will automate is ensuring that security certificates and software patches are up to date, and complying with cyber-security lists like the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FISAC) list and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s intel list. Previously, when those lists came into the bank, Jones would have to visit the related website and manually download into Excel a list of 20,000-30,000 compromise indicators, then dig through them to see which applied.

“Obviously that wasn’t something that was tenable,” Jones said, adding that it was difficult to maintain all the information and use it.

The bank did try using another third-party solution to automate some of the list comparisons before signing on with SEI, but found it necessary to manually resolve potential compromises that the automation couldn’t address.

“What SEI does for us is, all of that is automated,” Jones said. “Not only do they research the alarm, but they also do the remediation, keep us informed about what took place, what they did, whether it’s still a threat or anything like that.”

Steve Bomberger, IT services unit lead at SEI, said the solution includes automated workflows that support infrastructure resiliency and security at Progress, and support from a round-the-clock security operations center and a network operations center. The security aspects focus on email, endpoint and network security, and using a blend of proprietary and third-party tools, he said.

“The process for managing, detecting and remediating cybersecurity incidents is handled by SEI, resulting in an automated — yet personalized — experience for our clients,” Bomberger said.

Outsourcing security allows Progress Bank’s Jones to focus on growing the bank and more pressing regulatory and compliance issues, he said. And the Alabama bank is not the only one to be taking advantage of the opportunity. The $972 million American Riviera Bank, based in Santa Barbara, Calif., has also signed on for the service, according to SEI.

One advantage the Oaks, Pa.-based SEI may have in outsourcing security to banks is that it is a regulated company in its own right. In addition to offering cybersecurity automations, the company manages, advises or administrates $1 trillion in hedge, private equity and mutual funds, along with managed assets, according to the SEI website. That includes approximately $369 billion in assets under management and $787 billion in client assets under administration, and has 11,300 global clients, according to SEI.

Outsourcing could prove popular as more banks look for options to address their security worries. Data privacy and security ranked as the top concerns cited by 76 percent of financial services companies surveyed during the COVID pandemic, according to February Forrester report commissioned by Xerox.

This concern is “unsurprising given the need to manage the complexity of high-volume real-time digital customer communications, compounded by the risks of a dispersed, newly remote workforce,” Forrester noted.

Bank Automation Ignite, on April 13-14, is the event for inspiring automation initiatives and investment in financial services. At the virtual event, financial services professionals can discover new use cases and technologies that are accelerating automation in banking. Learn more and register at www.BankAutomationIgnite.com.