Good morning. As the U.S.–Iran conflict continues, banks and corporations face heightened risk of Iranian or proxy cyberattacks—not only on their systems but also on the vendors and service providers that support finance operations.
For CFOs, this is no longer a back-office IT issue; it’s a balance sheet, liquidity, and disclosure risk.
“We’re in the midst of annual planning cycles and insurance renewals, which makes this the critical window for CFOs to reassess vendor cyber resilience and coverage adequacy,” Joy Mbanugo, CFO of CXApp Inc., a workplace experience and employee engagement platform, told me. “Investing in cybersecurity is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have, right alongside AI investment, given the geopolitical landscape we’re operating in today.”
CXApp is treating vendor cyber risk as a material enterprise risk, integrating resilience assessments into its framework, updating incident playbooks, and aligning insurance coverage with vendor exposure, according to Mbanugo. “It’s essential to safeguard sensitive data and maintain stakeholder trust, which means moving from reactive incident response to proactive risk quantification with the same rigor we apply to any material balance sheet risk,” she said.
