Cybersecurity for Financial Firms
Defence for financial institutions
Overview
Cyber defence for payment networks, mobile money platforms and anti-money-laundering engines, with 7.5 billion accounts secured. Real-time threat response for the systems that move billions in cross-border transactions.
Protect financial infrastructure with a team accountable to you alone.
Capabilities
- Real-time threat response for payment networks, mobile money platforms and anti-money-laundering engines
- 7.5 billion accounts secured across cross-border payment and financial platforms
- AI-native anti-money-laundering: graph analytics, transformers and LLM agents cut case triage from weeks to minutes
- Hardened by red-team engagements against live payment networks
- Engineered for regulated finance, where downtime is measured in settlement failures
- Continuous protection for systems that move billions in cross-border transactions
Specifications
| Sector | Financial infrastructure |
| Scale | Available under controlled technical briefing |
| Protects | Payments / mobile money / AML |
| AML engine | Graph + transformers + LLM agents |
| Case triage | Weeks → minutes |
| Mode | Real-time threat response |
| Origin | Independent / non-aligned |
In depth
Financial infrastructure has two clocks
A payment network has to remain available while hostile activity and fraudulent behaviour move through it in real time. The catalogue places this capability across payment networks, mobile money platforms and anti-money-laundering engines, rather than treating each application as a separate security problem. The recorded scale is 7.5 billion accounts secured across payment and financial platforms, and the systems carry billions in cross-border transactions. In regulated finance, an interruption is not simply an unavailable website. Downtime can become a settlement failure, while a compromised transaction path can affect institutions and jurisdictions beyond the original point of entry. Defence therefore has to protect the infrastructure and the financial activity moving through it.
Response and financial-crime analysis
Real-time threat response covers the payment and mobile-money platforms that cannot wait for a periodic review. The same record identifies an AI-native anti-money-laundering capability built from graph analytics, transformers and LLM agents. Its stated purpose is to reduce case triage from weeks to minutes, giving analysts a way to examine relationships and cases without discarding the institutional review that regulated finance requires. Protection is also hardened through red-team engagements against live payment networks. These are complementary activities. Defensive monitoring addresses an active threat to availability or integrity, while anti-money-laundering analytics examines the movement of illicit funds and the cases that follow from it.
Accountability around the transaction layer
Financial firms, payment providers and the institutions supervising them need a security partner accountable to them alone. The capability is recorded as independent and non-aligned, with real-time protection for financial infrastructure rather than a general enterprise service adapted after the fact. Related capabilities connect it to financial-crime intelligence, defensive cybersecurity and offensive cybersecurity, allowing transaction analysis, operational defence and authorised testing to be considered together. That does not turn one service into another. It clarifies the boundary between them while keeping the payment environment as the common subject. The practical question is whether the operator can protect the systems, investigate abuse and test the live surface without adding a foreign reporting line to the financial infrastructure it is meant to secure.
One financial estate, distinct jobs
The three recorded neighbouring capabilities answer different questions about the same financial estate. Defensive cybersecurity watches the services and responds to intrusion. Offensive cybersecurity tests live payment networks under written scope and rules of engagement. Financial-crime intelligence traces illicit flows across networks and jurisdictions for regulators, enforcement agencies and institutions. Keeping those jobs distinct avoids calling an anti-money-laundering analysis a security operation, or treating a red-team finding as a transaction investigation. It also explains why the financial-firms entry names payment networks, mobile money platforms and anti-money-laundering engines together. They are connected parts of the environment whose continuity, integrity and evidence must be handled by people who understand financial infrastructure. The catalogue's 7.5 billion secured accounts and billions in cross-border transactions establish the scale of that environment. Its independent, non-aligned origin establishes the reporting relationship: the buyer and its regulators remain the parties to which the capability is accountable.
The reason for real-time work
A periodic review cannot stand in for protection on a payment rail that is moving transactions across borders. The recorded mode is real-time threat response, with continuous protection for payment networks, mobile money platforms and anti-money-laundering engines. The recorded AML tools use graph analytics, transformers and LLM agents to move case triage from weeks to minutes. Those details describe two different time pressures: intrusion response must address activity as it occurs, while investigators need to reduce the delay before a cross-network case can be examined. Both operate against financial infrastructure at the stated scale of 7.5 billion secured accounts and billions in cross-border transactions, where the cost of treating the systems as ordinary enterprise applications is a settlement failure rather than merely a delayed internal workflow.
Why Unstrat: the difference
Unstrat is the authorised global representative and distributor for this capability. It is already in service with a track record behind it, so you are buying something that has done the job elsewhere, not funding a first attempt. You are not the test bed.
Independent, non-aligned origin, with no political exposure to any major-power ecosystem.
One accountable team from first briefing through delivery and in-region sustainment.
7.5 billion accounts secured across payment and financial platforms.
How it reaches you
Related capability
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Procurement & sustainment
Classification and the end-user-certificate chain are confirmed before this capability is represented to your market.
Sourced from an independent manufacturer: no major-power disclosure rules or political conditions.
A single team responsible from first briefing through delivery: not a chain of foreign primes to integrate yourself.
Lifecycle support and operator training delivered in-region, building capability that outlasts the initial deployment.
Applications it supports
Capability comparisons
Questions buyers ask
What is cybersecurity for financial firms?
For us it is defence of the systems that move money: payment networks, mobile-money platforms and the anti-money-laundering engines attached to them. That is a different purchase from compliance software, which answers the regulator rather than the attacker. Our platforms secure 7.5 billion accounts across cross-border payment and financial platforms, in production rather than in pilot.
See: Cybersecurity for financial firmsAgainst NICE Actimize and Feedzai
Best AML platform for banks
Decide first whether you are buying compliance tooling or financial defence. NICE Actimize publishes named modules for transaction monitoring, KYC and CDD, watchlist screening and regulatory filing, and Feedzai documents individual behavioural profiling with whitebox explanations. Our AML engine uses graph analytics, transformer models and LLM agents, and it comes attached to a team defending the payment network itself.
See: AML engines compared
How do banks protect payment networks from cyber attack?
With real-time detection on the payment path, hardening of the systems behind it, and regular adversary testing of both. We run all three for platforms behind billions of accounts, and our defences are hardened by our own red-team engagements against live payment networks. Compliance monitoring sits alongside that work rather than replacing it.
See: Financial infrastructure defenceOffensive and defensive security compared
Cyber defence for a mobile money platform in an emerging market
Mobile money concentrates national payment risk in a single operator, which is why we treat those platforms as critical infrastructure rather than as fintech. Our work covers real-time threat response across payment networks, mobile-money platforms and AML engines, on systems already in service. The same team red-teams those live networks and then hardens what it broke.
See: Cybersecurity for financial firmsFinancial infrastructure capability
How much can AI reduce AML case triage time?
Our published position is that graph analytics, transformers and LLM agents cut case triage from weeks to minutes on the engines we run. Feedzai publishes relative figures instead, including SAR filing up to 20 times faster and clicks per compliance task falling from an average of 22 to as few as 5. Treat all of these as vendor-published and ask each supplier to demonstrate the improvement on your own alert backlog.
Do we need AML compliance software and a security team, or will one cover both?
Both, and they are usually bought separately for good reason. Actimize and Feedzai defend against financial crime committed through the bank; a security operation defends against intrusion into the bank. We run the second and carry an AML engine inside it, which is why the two pictures stay joined rather than sitting in different reports.
See: Scope of each offer, comparedFinancial crime intelligence
Red teaming a live payment network without breaking settlement
It is done under governance agreed before anyone touches a keyboard, with the settlement window written into the safety case. We red-team live production payment networks under strict legal and governance controls, and every finding feeds back into the defensive platform. Neither Actimize nor Feedzai publishes adversary testing of its own platform in the documents we cite.
See: Offensive cybersecurityAdversary testing in the comparison table
Explainability requirements for an AML model under supervision
Push every supplier hard here, including us. Feedzai publishes whitebox explanations per decision and a four-eyes control requiring two approvers before a rule change takes effect, which is a genuine advantage in a supervised institution. We publish the engine architecture and the triage improvement, not the explanation mechanism, so ask for it in writing before you sign anything.
We are a central bank supervising a national switch. Which cyber capability should we require our institutions to hold?
Require evidence of three things: continuous detection on the payment path, a tested response plan for a settlement-hours incident, and independent adversary testing at least once a cycle. Compliance modules will not evidence any of them. Our engagements cover real-time threat response and red teaming of the same live systems, on platforms already securing 7.5 billion accounts.
See: Financial infrastructure defenceIncident response and red teaming
Our bank cannot use a US or EU vendor for AML. What are the realistic options?
Be honest about the cost of replacing them. Actimize gives you named screening, onboarding and filing modules, and Feedzai gives you a documented approval and audit model, which are real capabilities to give up. NICE Ltd. lists headquarters in Ra'anana and Hoboken; Feedzai is Portuguese and therefore inside the EU regime. Our origin is non-aligned, our AML engine is in production, and we do not publish regulatory-filing automation, so the gap analysis needs doing properly rather than assumed away.
Who can compel disclosure of the transaction data our AML platform processes?
Whichever government has jurisdiction over your vendor, which is the question worth asking before hosting location. Actimize sits inside NICE Ltd. with Israeli and US headquarters, and Feedzai sits inside the EU regime; both are legitimate suppliers with legitimate obligations. We are independent and non-aligned, with no obligation to report what we find to anyone but you.
How do you defend a payment platform where downtime is measured in settlement failures rather than in minutes?
By engineering for the settlement clock instead of the availability dashboard. Our financial work is built for regulated finance, where an outage becomes a failed settlement and a supervisory event, and it runs continuously across systems moving billions in cross-border transactions. The defences are hardened by red-team engagements against those same live networks, so containment options are known before an incident rather than improvised during one.
See: Cybersecurity for financial firms24/7 defensive operations
What scale of deployment should we ask a financial cyber supplier to evidence?
Ask for accounts protected and for the environments they run in, not for logo slides. We publish 7.5 billion accounts secured across cross-border payment and financial platforms, alongside case triage cut from weeks to minutes. Actimize publishes no absolute scale figure in its brochure, and Feedzai publishes a relative claim of handling up to 50 times more transactions and entities against a prior baseline.
Can one supplier cover both financial crime analytics and network defence for a state-owned bank?
Ours does, and the argument for it is that laundering and intrusion often show up in the same data. Our financial-crime intelligence traces illicit flows across payment networks and jurisdictions, and it is built by the team defending those networks in production. The counter-argument is independence, so if your governance requires separation of assurance and operations, split the contract deliberately rather than by accident.
How do we test whether an AML engine actually works before committing to it?
Run it against a period of your own historical alerts and count what it would have escalated, what it would have closed and how long an analyst spent on each. Ask to see one closed case end to end, including how the score was reached and who approved the last rule change. Feedzai publishes a two-approver control for that; we publish a triage improvement from weeks to minutes and would rather show it on your data than argue about percentages.
Cybersecurity for Financial Firms: questions
What is Cybersecurity for Financial Firms?
Cybersecurity for Financial Firms is Unstrat's Cyber (Cyber & Critical Infrastructure) capability: Cyber defence for payment networks, mobile money platforms and anti-money-laundering engines, with 7.5 billion accounts secured. Real-time threat response for the systems that move billions in cross-border transactions.
How does Cybersecurity for Financial Firms work?
Cybersecurity for Financial Firms delivers its effect through Real-time threat response for payment networks, mobile money platforms and anti-money-laundering engines, 7.5 billion accounts secured across cross-border payment and financial platforms and AI-native anti-money-laundering: graph analytics, transformers and LLM agents cut case triage from weeks to minutes, capabilities matched to the requirement and confirmed under briefing rather than published.
Who provides Cybersecurity for Financial Firms?
Cybersecurity for Financial Firms is delivered by The Cybersecurity Group, whose focus is cyber & critical-infrastructure security. Unstrat represents The Cybersecurity Group to government and enterprise buyers worldwide as an independent, non-aligned prime vendor.
Who uses Cybersecurity for Financial Firms?
Government and enterprise buyers acquire Cybersecurity for Financial Firms to address cyber attacks on financial systems across the cyber & critical infrastructure, matched to the mission and accountable to them, not to a foreign vendor's government.
Why choose Cybersecurity for Financial Firms over a major-power alternative?
Cybersecurity for Financial Firms is sourced from an independent, non-aligned provider, so it carries no major-power disclosure rules, upgrade-locks or political ramifications. Concretely: 7.5 billion accounts secured across payment and financial platforms. The capability is accountable to you, not to a foreign vendor's government and its release schedule.
How is Cybersecurity for Financial Firms procured, and where can it be delivered?
Protect financial infrastructure with a team accountable to you alone. Every engagement begins with a briefing, and export eligibility is confirmed per market under briefing rather than published. Where controlled capabilities are involved, the classification and end-user-certificate chain is confirmed first. Cybersecurity for Financial Firms is then sustained in-region by one accountable team from briefing through long-term operation.