customer success story: Empowering DLP and Compliance at Scale for Financial Services

Industry: Financial Services

Employees: 2,000+

Key Services: Data Loss Prevention, Vulnerability Management

Challenge: Post-acquisition security integration, compliance risk, data loss exposure

The Challenge:

Post-Acquisition Risk Exposure and Immature Security Posture

A leading global bank had recently acquired our client, a smaller investment management organisation. While the parent organisation maintained robust baseline DLP policies and compliance controls, our client lacked a dedicated service owner, mature policy frameworks, and structured documentation. The acquired entity’s data loss prevention capabilities were ad hoc, failing to meet the rigorous compliance standards of the acquiring organisation, or align with regulatory mandates from FCA, PCI DSS, SWIFT, and ICO/GDPR.

This presented a critical risk surface expansion:

  • Sensitive business and personal data were insufficiently protected.

  • No centralised ownership of DLP or policy review processes.

  • Inadequate visibility into contractor activities and personal domain interactions.

  • Exposure to reputational damage, compliance fines, and operational gaps if security controls were not quickly unified and optimised.

Our client needed a flexible, expert driven solution to quickly remediate, unify, and uplift their DLP posture, without disrupting ongoing business operations.

 

Our Approach:

We at Cyro Cyber engaged as a strategic extension of the client’s internal cyber team, delivering an end-to-end DLP transformation program.

Our mission was to harmonise disparate tools and policies across the acquired and acquiring organisations, reduce data exfiltration risks, and ensure compliance with regulatory frameworks.

  1. Policy Mapping and Cleansing:

    • Mapped existing DLP policies across both entities.

    • Translated legacy rules to leverage Microsoft Purview’s full capability set.

    • Rationalised and tested classifiers to reduce false positives.

  2. Security Hardening with a Least Privilege Model:

    • Implemented a least privilege access model, significantly reducing unnecessary access to sensitive data.

    • Cleansed redundant permissions and shadow IT risks.

  3. Multi Stage DLP Rollout:

    • Deployed DLP policies in monitoring mode to gather business insights before enforcement.

    • Created sensitive information types/custom classifiers, tailored to business specific data flows.

    • Monitored behavioural outcomes to fine tune policy logic and exception handling.

  4. Long Term Strategic Enablement:

    • Produced low level designs and documentation artifacts to institutionalise knowledge.

    • Centralised governance models to ensure continuity, even as personnel change.

    • Wrote user communication plans to educate staff and increase adoption across departments.

  5. On Demand Expertise

    • Provided on call cyber security specialists to support ongoing policy evolution and threat response.

    • Embedded experts into internal teams, fostering trust and seamless collaboration.

 

The Results:

Through our partnership, the client achieved full regulatory alignment, enhanced visibility, and a scalable security foundation fit for future growth.

Tangible Outcomes:

  • Developed robust, scalable DLP policies tailored to business units

  • Created accurate custom classifiers for sensitive data, reducing false positives

  • Implemented a monitoring first approach to de-risk rollout and educate users

  • Built a least privilege access model, reducing exposure points

  • Centralised policy documentation, ensuring business continuity

  • Secured contractor workflows and personal domains, mitigating exfiltration risks

  • Positioned DLP as a business enabler, not just a compliance checkbox

 

Why It Mattered to the Business

Compliance with a range of regulations is key, but for this organisation, it was so much more than that. It was about protecting trust, brand reputation, and financial stability. The benefits of undertaking this scope of work indeed provided them with a more mature security posture, but failure to do this, or worse, to do it poorly, could have been costly.

As a result of working with Cyro Cyber, they:

  • Regulatory Risks Avoided: Mitigated potential FCA, ICO, and PCI DSS fines.

  • Brand Trust Preserved: Reduced risk of data breaches or public incidents during post-acquisition integration.

  • Operational Resilience Boosted: Delivered a repeatable model to manage future M&A cyber security efforts.

  • Maintained Relationships: Avoided any relationship damage with parent company

 

Key Lessons for Financial Services Leaders:

  • M&A Exposes Hidden Gaps:
    Post-acquisition environments often reveal undocumented systems and poor policy hygiene, so cyber security must be part of the process to protect both organisations.

  • DLP Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All:
    Tools are only as effective as the business understanding behind them. We tailored policies to meet real world data usage patterns.

  • Cyber Teams Need Flexibility and Foresight:
    By embedding ourselves as an on-demand security partner, we gave the client the scale, agility, and governance they needed to future proof their data protection program.

 

Want to Strengthen Your DLP Program?

If you're navigating complex security integrations, regulatory pressures, or simply need to scale your DLP with confidence, we’re here to help.

Get in touch today.

Featured
A New Era of Phishing… Are You Ready for What’s Next?
A New Era of Phishing… Are You Ready for What’s Next?

Phishing and spear phishing have long plagued individuals and organisations alike. For years, the silver lining was that many of these emails were riddled with obvious signs - poor grammar, awkward phrasing, and strange formatting…But that window of easy detection is closing rapidly.

Walking the Walk: Closing the Cyber Gap Inside Insurance Companies
Walking the Walk: Closing the Cyber Gap Inside Insurance Companies

The insurance industry has long been on the front lines of risk management. Yet, when it comes to protecting their own digital assets, many in the insurance providers, brokers, underwriters and MGAs are still playing catch-up. In a world where cyber threats are constantly shifting, relying solely on internal cyber security teams and traditional compliance measures is no longer enough.

You Might Already Know What to Do in a Cyber Incident… But Are You Ready to Do It? 
You Might Already Know What to Do in a Cyber Incident… But Are You Ready to Do It? 

If you’re a cyber security professional operating in the public sector or critical national infrastructure space, you probably already know the fundamentals of incident response.  You understand that a breach isn’t just a technical problem, but a crisis that spreads across the whole organisation.

But the truth is, “knowing” isn’t the same as “being ready”. 

The Cyber Talent Gap - The Silent Cyber Threat Undermining Our Resilience
The Cyber Talent Gap - The Silent Cyber Threat Undermining Our Resilience

There’s a cyber threat quietly undermining the UK’s national security - and it’s not just coming from threat actors. It’s a threat of our own making, the chronic shortage of cyber professionals defending our critical systems.