In today’s highly regulated and increasingly digitized financial landscape, insider threats remain one of the most challenging and costly risks to manage. Whether malicious or careless, insiders have access to sensitive systems, proprietary data, and client information—making them uniquely positioned to cause harm. For financial services (FinServ) organizations, which operate under tight compliance mandates and face intense scrutiny from regulators and customers alike, mitigating insider risk is not just a cybersecurity priority—it’s a business imperative.
In this blog, we highlight why Proofpoint Insider Threat Management (ITM) is trusted by leading financial institutions—including top hedge funds—to protect and defend against insider risks and threats.
Purpose-built for insider risk
Unlike traditional endpoint detection tools or general-purpose security platforms, Proofpoint ITM was designed from the ground up to detect, investigate, and prevent insider threats. It provides comprehensive visibility into user activity—without compromising employee privacy or productivity—enabling FinServ organizations to quickly identify risky behavior before it leads to data loss, fraud, or regulatory violations.
With Proofpoint ITM, financial institutions can monitor and correlate contextual user actions such as file movements, data transfers, use of unauthorized applications, and anomalous behavior patterns. This is especially critical in a sector where users routinely interact with high-value assets and sensitive customer data across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
Proactive detection with real-time context
Speed matters in insider threat detection. Proofpoint ITM gives security teams the ability to proactively detect threats in real-time by capturing detailed forensics—including detailed metadata and screen captures. This level of visibility not only accelerates investigations and informs the appropriate response, but also provides actionable intelligence to stop data exfiltration in progress. Visual capture is often used as irrefutable evidence to support an investigation. And the activity player provides a visual playback of a user’s actions to speed up investigations.
What’s more, Proofpoint ITM can proactively detect unknown risk with dynamic monitoring, which triggers based on risky behavior. The dynamic monitoring feature can help ensure employee privacy by only collecting visual evidence when there is risky behavior. Employee privacy can be further protected by obfuscating sensitive information and only allowing analysts to view on a need-to-know basis. FinServ organizations often require storing sensitive data in cloud storage that is managed by them. To support this, Proofpoint ITM allows customers to bring their own storage for sensitive data, all without compromising the analyst workflow and speed.
A departing employee is the leading use case for many FinServ organizations. If an investment analyst took sensitive financial data to a competitor or a developer leaked proprietary code for a trading system, it could have significant financial and brand implications. For example, if an employee attempts to move sensitive financial data to a personal cloud storage account or USB device before leaving, Proofpoint ITM can trigger alerts, block the action, or notify the SOC—all within seconds. This proactive capability is essential in FinServ, where data leakage can have immediate financial and reputational consequences.
Compliance and audit readiness
Proofpoint ITM supports compliance with key financial regulations and industry standards such as GLBA, FFIEC, FINRA, and PCI DSS. Its audit-friendly architecture ensures that every action is recorded, securely stored, and easily retrievable for compliance reviews or incident response.
The solution also provides prebuilt policy templates tailored to financial services workflows and common risk scenarios. This not only simplifies deployment but also ensures consistent enforcement of internal policies and external mandates.
Trusted by leading financial institutions
Leading global banks, insurance providers, investment firms, hedge funds, and fintech organizations trust Proofpoint ITM to protect their data, systems, and reputations. Whether navigating M&A transitions, workforce changes, or third-party risk, Proofpoint empowers FinServ organizations to maintain operational resilience and build a culture of security from within. Insider threats are a growing concern—but they don’t have to be unmanageable. With Proofpoint ITM, financial services leaders gain the visibility, control, and context needed to proactively reduce risk, ensure compliance, and defend against data loss in real time.
With Insider Threat Awareness Month approaching, now is the time to evaluate your strategy.
Explore how Proofpoint ITM equips financial services organizations to eliminate threats, build trust, and foster growth: https://www.proofpoint.com/us/products/insider-threat-management.
Explore how Proofpoint’s fully integrated human-centric security platform supports the financial services industry with confidence: https://www.proofpoint.com/us/solutions/financial-services-and-insurance.
