What We’re Reading: Finance Meets Social

Hello fur-acious readers! Here at ZeroFox we always have our noses down in a good read -- here are our favorite articles from the past two weeks in, finance meets social.

The financial and insurance industries have recently been exploring the possibility of judging clients based on their behavior on social media. Social media data-driven companies are able to aggregate data and provide financial institutions with information about your social media profiles’ content. Consequently, lenders or insurance providers can leverage that information to better predict the creditworthiness of a potential client.

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have grown to impact the financial industry in other ways, such as providing best practices in the industry and the capability to communicate time-sensitive financial information easily. Twitter, for instance, can even affect the stock market.

At the same time, banking and insurance institutions continue to grapple with social media’s downsides, chief among them customer scams, fraud and phishing. Accenture predicts risk management spending to continue increasing in the coming years.

• The Motley Fool -- How Banks Are Cashing In on Your Social Media and More
• The Motley Fool tackles financials in their Industry Focus video this week. The conversation revolves around big data from social media and how it can be used by organizations for a host of reasons: gathering demographic information, guessing buyer preferences, and more.
• Online Social Media -- Five Reasons Twitter is the Darling of Financial Services
• OSM detailed the top 5 reasons financial institution continue to adopt Twitter. Twitter is quick, it reflects public opinion, it brings experts together, it aggregates information to a platform, and in some cases, it can even influence the stock market. “Traditionally, old media and personal connections would have been the way people go their tips but now with the proliferation of social media, and Twitter in particular, it’s much easier for those in the industry to get information.
• Accenture -- 2015 Global Risk Study
• Accenture predicts risk management spending to increase in the coming years. Their 2015 Global Risk Study studied responses from over 150 executives in the banking and risk management spaces. “The focus of risk management in today’s banks continues to make a crucial shift. The risk function is repositioning itself as an important partner with which the rest of the business can collaborate to achieve its goals safely and efficiently, instead of being seen as a controlling function for other parts of the bank to circumnavigate.”

Check back in a few weeks for more of what the foxes are reading!