From Intelligence Overload to Confident Action

How a regulated digital payments company built the security decisioning capability its central bank regulator demanded.

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This case study follows a fast-growing digital wallet and payments company, serving millions of customers under central bank oversight, as it moved from drowning in overlapping threat feeds to making fast, governed, defensible security decisions. It's a practical look at what it actually takes to turn threat intelligence into action when both attackers and regulators are watching.

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WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

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• Why "more feeds" made the problem worse, not better, and how analysts ended up running a data-management operation instead of a security operation.
• What regulated FinTechs are actually accountable for under formal Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) requirements, and why noise becomes a compliance risk, not just a security one.
• How the company closed the gap between detection and decision as adversaries compressed attack chains from days to minutes.
• What an "Intelligent Unification Layer" does in practice — unifying, normalizing, and prioritizing intelligence so teams can act with speed and confidence.
• A repeatable model other FinTechs can use to satisfy regulators while positioning for growth.

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WHY THIS MATTERS NOW

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Financial services is now the most targeted industry on the planet, and the economics of an incident keep getting steeper. For a regulated FinTech, a missed signal can lead to compliance failure with direct consequences for penalties, customer trust, and even its operating license.

The hard part is no longer finding threats. It's acting on them quickly enough, and being able to show your work when a regulator asks. This story shows how one company built that capability.

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The numbers behind the pressure

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• 27% of all breaches handled in 2024 hit the financial sector — up from 19% a year earlier, making it the most-attacked industry globally. (Kroll, 2024 Data Breach Outlook)
• ~42% of breaches at top FinTech companies originated from third-party vendors, meaning the intelligence teams must monitor extends well beyond their own perimeter. (SecurityScorecard, 2025)
• $3M median ransom demand in financial services in 2025 — a 50% jump from $2M in 2024. (Sophos, State of Ransomware in Financial Services)
• 84% of cybersecurity professionals report burnout, with 89% citing being overworked as a primary cause. (Hack The Box, 2024)
• $626M+ lost annually to stress and fatigue among security staff at medium-to-large U.S. organizations.

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"When your analysts are spending hours correlating data between systems instead of acting on intelligence, you're not running a security operation. You're running a data management problem." — Industry insider, as told to Anomali

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