Data from the UK government’s Cybersecurity breaches survey for 2025 paints a stark picture for FinTechs. 48% of finance or insurance businesses identified a cybersecurity breach or attack in the last 12 months. Similar numbers have been reported by Mastercard. A survey of 5,000 small and medium-sized businesses across four continents revealing that 46% have suffered a cyberattack. It’s increasingly becoming clear that it’s a case of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ a business will be targeted by cybercriminals.

The growing urgency surrounding cyberattacks is helping drive a strategic shift in how organisations approach threat intelligence. When everything becomes urgent, it becomes increasingly complex to determine what is and isn’t a priority. Taking decisive and impactful action can be challenging. Threat intelligence is helping to solve this problem. With the right intelligence provider, people and processes, threat intelligence can prove a crucial part of a cybersecurity programme. It enables FinTechs to create an understanding of the who, what, how, when and why of security risks. This is pivotal for managing, accepting and reducing risk, and delivering wider ROI.

Automated Intelligence for Cybersecurity

The effectiveness of a Cybersecurity programme ultimately depends on a combination of people, processes, products and policies. Threat intelligence can add value in each of these areas. Identifying and prioritising the threats which matter most to an organisation. Not all threats carry the same level of risk. By narrowing focus to the most relevant and probable attacks, FinTechs can strengthen their overall preparedness and resilience.

Threat intelligence can provide actionable insights to better anticipate potential attacks and address vulnerabilities. This can help to prevent a security breach, minimise the possible impact of an attack and improve overall responsiveness. It’s for these reasons that threat intelligence can deliver tangible ROI, in both the short and long term.

Without automated threat intelligence and context, Cybersecurity teams can be swamped with time-consuming manual workflows required to gather and analyse data. Alongside this, manual alert triage, investigation and response processes can prove time and resource intensive, as well as being slow. A recent report by Recorded Future shows how automated threat intelligence can overcome these challenges. Cybersecurity teams can save nearly 11 hours each week by streamlining threat detection. They can then move straight to responding to relevant alerts more quickly. A similar amount of time per week was also saved through more efficient threat analysis, hunting and reporting. This enables valuable security resources to shift to other meaningful tasks that expand and grow their skills. Moreover, improving the overall security posture of their organisation.  

Further findings from the report show examples of businesses automating 70% of manual security workflows, cutting investigation times by 50% and driving a 30% reduction in response times. Teams can work more efficiently and effectively to minimise downtime. Average billion-dollar businesses investing in threat intelligence recovered over $19,000 per month in revenue. This was due to reduced downtime, according to the Recorded Future report. That figure doesn’t account for the additional impacts of downtime, such as erosion of customer trust, productivity losses, and recovery expenses.

Protecting Brand Reputations

Threat intelligence also had a marked impact on cyber insurance costs, with organisations reporting reduced premiums of nearly $30,000 a year. Further ROI can be experienced through the mitigation of risks on brand reputation – something that’s particularly important in financial services, where customers want to be confident that their money and financial interests are being placed in safe hands. People need to be able to trust the FinTechs they do business with, and typosquats – illegitimate but similar-looking web domains – can quickly erode this trust.  

Typosquats can be quickly identified, whether it’s company logos or brands being abused, and removed through the comprehensive understanding of digital footprints provided by threat intelligence. This can prove crucial in minimising the risks of phishing and safeguarding customers from inadvertently disclosing personal information to cybercriminals. 

Cybersecurity Resilience

Cybersecurity resilience powered by threat intelligence can deliver cross-functional value across a whole organisation. It can help FinTechs to align their organisations and customers with real risks, rather than hypothetical ones, to effectively manage and mitigate the growing issue of cyberattacks. This starts by defining an organisation’s security priorities and assessing threats in the context of risk to the FinTech. It’s an important first step to determining that not all vulnerabilities will be exploited, and not all threat actors pose an immediate risk, creating opportunity to focus on addressing the actual issues that are genuinely urgent and could actually harm people, assets and business.

To find out more about how advanced threat intelligence solutions can deliver team productivity improvements and business and brand risk reduction impact, download Recorded Future’s ROI for Cybersecurity Teams report.