Announced during Cybersecurity Awareness Month in October 2020, the Cyber Council’s mission is to identify best practices and areas of shared risk to help ATPC members address the evolving cyber threat across America’s payments processing ecosystem. The Cyber Council will spend the next two years developing and sharing a vision to strengthen the industry’s ability to identify, protect, detect, respond to and recover from cyberattacks. Leading the way will be Cyber Council Director Norma Krayem, Vice President and Chair of Van Scoyoc Associates Cybersecurity, Privacy & Digital Innovation Practice Group and Chairwoman Kara Hill, Chief Information Security Officer at FIS.
Norma Krayem brings more than 20 years of global policy experience in technology, cyber and privacy risk in critical infrastructure having held executive positions in the U.S. Departments of State, Commerce and Transportation. Krayem focuses on global cybersecurity and operational risk across critical infrastructure, working with companies to integrate emerging technology and FinTech solutions while addressing systems risks. She also is a global thought leader on cyber issues having created one of the first ever cyber practices in an AmLaw 100 firm and is a regular expert panelist in the Cyber Future Dialogue Conferences in Davos, Switzerland, held during the World Economic Forum.
In the race for a better tomorrow, technology solutions can advance faster than companies can keep up with cybersecurity risks. No one understands how technological advancements and innovation can be vulnerable to risk better than Norma. As the new Cyber Council director, she will be working closely with ATPC members to focus on embedding cybersecurity and privacy protections at the front end of their fintech innovations while continually introducing global best practices to the world’s largest processing platforms.
As Chief Information Security Officer, Kara Hill holds the highest Information Security position within FIS, the world’s largest fintech company providing banking, payments and e-commerce capabilities to financial institutions and businesses. She drives both the department’s culture and policies. As the payments sector meets cyber threats head-on, Hill’s priority is protecting FIS customers and supporting the industry to combat these threats.
In her role as the Cyber Council’s chair, Kara will work closely with Norma to strengthen cybersecurity resiliency within the payments industry. Together, their Council initiatives focus on five areas:
- Sharing resiliency best practices and standards across member firms to facilitate dialogue and education
- Identifying areas of aggregated risk, to assess and address together as necessary
- Facilitating joint activities to exercise best practices, identify lessons learned and opportunities to address together
- Identify core risks and common attack scenarios
- Enhance public and private relationships to increase cybersecurity policy and legislative efforts within the industry
Kara is thrilled to have been appointed as the new Cyber Council chair and is excited to work with companies dedicated to cybersecurity. This enhanced cybersecurity program will support the processing industry to continue to maintain strong defenses against cyber attacks.
“The ATPC Cyber Council is in expert hands under Norma’s and Kara’s leadership, they are leading global experts in cybersecurity issues in the banking and financial services sector,” said H. West Richards, ATPC Executive Director. “Their global policy making expertise and extensive relationships with regulators and decision-makers across the globe will be a great benefit to ATPC members.”
ATPC and the Cyber Council will continue the ATPC’s efforts by holding a variety of forums to increase visibility and cyber risk awareness while leveraging best practices within the payment processing industry as well as the larger banking and financial services sector. 2021 events are being planned now and past forums have featured experts from the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security and Treasury, the U.S. Secret Service; the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as well as leaders within the state of Georgia and within the State of Georgia and the City of Atlanta’s “Transaction Alley”