CERTFin, the new organization highly specialized in cybersecurity for the banking and financial sectors, has been established to prevent and combat cyber threats linked to the development of new technologies and to the digital economy.

 The Bank of Italy, together with the Italian Banking Association and the ABI Lab Consortium, signed an agreement in Rome today to strengthen cooperation on cybersecurity. The objective is to ensure greater security for operators in Italy’s banking and financial sectors and for the households, businesses and general government departments that use digital services.

 The agreement – signed by the Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Italy, Salvatore Rossi, the Director General of ABI, Giovanni Sabatini, and the President of ABI Lab, Pierfrancesco Gaggi – will see the creation of a highly specialized Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) for Italy’s financial sector, to prevent and combat cyber threats linked to the development of new technologies and to the digital economy.

 Called CERTFin, the new response team will operate in accordance with the principle of public-private sector cooperation. It will be tasked with collecting statistics, information and reports and analyzing all the phenomena linked to cybersecurity, enabling banking and financial operators in Italy to exchange information effectively and, at the same time, offering them a series of tools and services to further strengthen security safeguards.

 CERTFin’s activity will make it possible to circulate news of events and IT security-related phenomena even more swiftly and uniformly, and to strengthen the cyber-intelligence of the banking and financial sectors, benefiting the country as a whole.

 Moreover, starting in January, CERTFin will gradually make a range of services available to the banking and financial communities, with the aim of delivering all services required by the international standards within two years.

 In line with the National Strategic Framework for the Security of Cyberspace, CERTFin will also liaise with the other institutional actors on initiatives under way nationwide in the field of cybersecurity and the protection of critical infrastructures, drawing on past experience and further expanding the network of institutional partners and national and international experts.

 Participation in CERTFin will be open to all operators in the sector: banks, payment service providers, financial intermediaries, market infrastructures and companies, IT and internet infrastructure providers, insurance firms and other sector authorities. CERTFin’s strategic and managerial decisions will be entrusted to a Strategic Committee chaired by the Bank of Italy and ABI, while its services will be coordinated by an operational unit overseen by ABI Lab and made available to members on a cooperative basis, thanks to the involvement of Italy’s financial operators.