New Financial System Analysis & Resilience Center Formed

In tandem with its long-standing intelligence-sharing organization, the American financial services industry has formed an organization working on its strategic, systemic cyber-defense and resilience. The formation of this new Financial Systems Analysis and Resilience Center (FSARC) was announced by the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), today.  

FSARC is the brainchild of eight large banks that are members of FS-ISAC - Bank of America, BNY Mellon, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, State Street, and Wells Fargo. Through FSARC, large banks will have "closer collaboration" with government partners in the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and US Department of Treasury. 

While FS-ISAC continues to be focused on distributing timely information about active threats, FSARC will take a longer view -- performing deeper analysis to create long-term strategies to address systemic risks across financial products and practices.

As Andrew Hoerner, FS-ISAC vice president of communications explains, "FS-ISAC is focused on real-time threat intelligence sharing for incident response and prevention. FSARC is focused on proactive analysis at a meta level to identify and analyze threats and risks across the sector and come up with solutions to prevent emerging threats and risks."

FSARC will use the same "circle of trust" membership model used by FS-ISAC. Bank of America’s Siobhan MacDermott and JPMorgan’s Greg Rattray will serve as interim Co-Presidents "until the center reaches full operational capability." 

The formation of FSARC comes on the heels of (but not in response to) US bank regulators' releasing draft rules for cybersecurity that would require financial services organizations to (among other things) recover from any cyberattack within two hours, and finance leaders at a G7 meeting pushing a global financial cybersecurity framework.