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Most companies plan to offer work-from-home or mingle working options for staff to choose from after pandemics. As a Gartner survey (2020), 47% of companies allow employees to remain full-time remote work, while 43% of companies allow to provide flexible days for employees. However, the policy of remote working may not be easily made by organizations. One of the reasons will be the rising business risks of cyber security.

Before pandemics, worldwide organizations have been constantly attacked by hackers. For example, Marriot, the renowned international hotel, confirmed that nearly 500 million data from hotel guest was stolen in 2018. While in 2019, the technology giant Facebook could not prevent from the leakage of over 500 million users’ data. Unfortunately, the risks of cyberattacks only increase as more employees work at home.

Without security setting of office system such as firewall, doubtful IP address detections, the times when staffs work at home might be exposures of weakness. A variety of cyberattacks appear in recent years, according to the survey from Check Point and Dimensional Research (2020), phishing placed first (55%) and malicious websites suggesting information related to pandemics placed second (32%), while malware and ransomware accounted for 28% and 19% respectively.

Based on Bloomberg’s summary, the fear of cyber incidents is the same as the pandemic for business. Thus, to combat the threats from cyberattacks, organization should consider cyber security long-term strategy. In my opinion, educating staffs to increase awareness could be an effective way for solving phishing attack such as training employees to be able to further notice senders’ email address as well as website address before action. Nevertheless, establishing a team of security experts for developing cyber security policy and examining software and hardware security on regular basis will be a long-term solution for organizations to face the upcoming virtual challenges.

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How do you pay when buying groceries in stores or online? There are several options nowadays such as cash, credit cards, and online payment we can choose from. Some of which are not even released by traditional banks. For instance, Apple Pay and Google Pay launched in 2014 and 2015 respectively, have been both the options of contactless payment for smartphone users. According to Statista’s 2019 survey, both payments account for total 179 million users worldwide in 2018 and their users are expected to increase, especially under COVID pandemics. Since these technology companies have taken their first steps, do they aim for other financial services or even bigger dream?

One of their notable attempts is embedded finance, which means plugging in software with the financial service from startups to meet customers’ overall needs, such as banking to insurance, without banks as the intermediatory. For example, Amazon can let customers “buy now pay later” when they check out. According to Matt Harris, a partner at investor Bain Capital Ventures, embedded financial services reform traditional cross-sell concept and mainly benefit the embedded companies. Though established financial institutions might not be greatly influenced now, since most of the fintech companies have not yet grown big enough to share the market. Nevertheless, the development of embedded finance seems positive as Accenture indicated new entrants to the payment market have gained 8% of revenue across countries in 2019.

Despite embedded finance, different companies have also tried various approaches to engage in banking services. Apple collaborates with Golden Sachs to provide credit cards. On the other hand, Google has teamed up with Citi bank ready to launch the bank account, Plex. As CNBC concluded, one thing that both companies share is they have no plan to become regulated banking institutions. However, although obtaining permission to run financial business is not easy, these tech giants are indeed diving deeper in banking without a doubt. Take Facebook as another example, the company had gone through a failure to release Libra, its digital currency, but it is still preserved to raise another challenge like Facebook pay.

Compared to banking industry, technology companies are able to collect all kinds of our private data, from relationships, preferences till emotions, no matter we are conscious or not. Once they eventually expand their business to personal transaction, will it be an advantage or threat to customers? Gerard du Toit, a banking consultant at Bain reminded, “All of these players have quite bold ambitions to be the center of everyone’s life, where you just can’t imagine breaking up with them.” Becoming banks or similar financial institutions might be the target for tech companies to provide distinctive services that help increase profits or remain competitive. But as the customers, we can decide whether efficiency or diversification of risk matter us the most.