Even well-funded UK financial services firms, armed with sophisticated tools, healthy budgets, and expert teams, often find themselves reactive, overloaded by alerts, and uncertain whether their threat intelligence tooling is genuinely paying off.
You may ask: “We’ve invested so much. Why isn’t it working? Where is the actionable insight?” The answer often lies in strategy, not spending.

A High-Stakes Environment

UK financial services operate under relentless pressure, where cyber risks can have widespread consequences. A systemic outage could disrupt everything from direct debits and salaries to trading systems and online payments, sparking public panic (The Guardian, 2025). In 2024, financial services leaders in the UK invested over £1 million each on implementing regulations like DORA and the PRA cyber rules, recognising the critical importance of compliance (Infosecurity Magazine, 2025).

Despite this investment, ransomware remains the sector’s greatest cyber threat, highlighting that having the right tools and compliance measures alone is not enough to fully defend against evolving attacks (Business Wire, 2025). In fact, compliance has now become the top cyber security challenge for many firms (Infosecurity Magazine, 2025), while nearly two-thirds of financial leaders warn that weak cyber defences pose a direct risk to UK economic growth (Yahoo Finance, 2024).

Substantial spending and regulatory compliance don’t necessarily guarantee effective protection. Many organisations continue to struggle with alert fatigue, inefficient threat intelligence processes, and uncertainty about which threats to prioritise - all factors that can leave them vulnerable to costly ransomware and other threats.

The Tesco Bank Lesson

Tesco Bank became a cautionary tale for the financial sector. Thieves exploited vulnerabilities in the bank’s card issuing process to steal £2.26 million from nearly 9,000 customer accounts - around 6.6% of its entire customer base (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, FinCyber Strategy Timeline). The attackers likely used an algorithm to generate valid card numbers based on Tesco’s identifying number and the industry standard Luhn check. Weaknesses such as sequential card numbers and overly simplistic fraud checks, like only verifying if a card was set to expire in the future, made the attack possible.

Despite earlier warnings from Visa and Mastercard about this type of fraud, Tesco Bank’s controls didn’t reflect the threat landscape. The attack, which primarily targeted magnetic strip transactions, spread across the US, Spain, and Brazil over a weekend. After struggling to contain it, Tesco was forced to halt all online and contactless payments.

The FCA fined Tesco Bank £16.4 million, citing "deficiencies in its financial crime controls" and its inadequate response. What stands out is that this wasn’t a failure of resource, rather, a failure to link known threat intelligence to the bank’s specific systems and processes. Had Tesco embedded threat intelligence into its fraud prevention strategy, it’s possible that warnings could have triggered pre-emptive mitigations.

This incident underscores why contextual and actionable threat intelligence, rooted in Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs), is essential. Without that, even well resourced firms risk being blindsided by threats that, devastatingly, were already on the radar.

The Role of PIRs

No two businesses are the same. Take, for example, a retail bank and an investment company. Each has very different critical systems, customer data, operational priorities, and threat actors targeting them. Because of this, threat intelligence cannot be one-size-fits-all. What matters deeply to one organisation may be irrelevant noise to another.

Security teams chasing every alert without focus risk alert fatigue, wasting time and resources on irrelevant information. Worse, they may miss critical signals buried in the noise - signals that could prevent costly breaches or regulatory failures. In highly regulated sectors like financial services, such oversights can lead to not only operational damage, but also severe compliance penalties.

So, how do you determine what’s relevant to you? You establish Priority Intelligence Requirements. PIRs are typically a huge set of carefully crafted targeted questions developed through human insight and deep understanding of your business, systems and environment. They’re strategic guideposts that help you identify what intelligence truly matters to your business.

PIRs ask questions such as:

Which systems store or process your most sensitive data?
Which threat actors are targeting your industry, geography, or systems?
What vulnerabilities in your technology stack - whether cloud platforms, legacy systems, or internal applications - pose the most immediate and actionable risk?

By starting with PIRs, you provide clear direction and focus which transforms raw data into meaningful, actionable intelligence. Without this context, the flood of alerts, indicators of compromise, and threat feeds becomes just noise, and your threat intelligence program risks becoming a reactive, inefficient cost centre rather than a proactive business enabler.

AI Can’t Do It All

Automation and AI can sift through endless data efficiently. IBM found that firms using AI reduced breach costs by an average of USD 2.22 million (2024). However, it can’t do it all. In financial services, regulators emphasise that automation must be accompanied by human validation - especially in AI-generated intelligence (SC Magazine.) For example, AI can flag an unusual IP address, but it’s the analysts who decide if it matters. AI is great for filtering and summarising, but it can’t make judgements yet. It’s the humans who connect the dots, assess credibility, and confirm attribution. Human led intelligence remains essential.

Regulations Demand Strategic Threat Intelligence

Starting January 2025, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) requires UK firms serving EU clients to implement strong IT third party risk management and actively share threat information (European Commission, 2023; FCA, 2022; PRA, 2023). Similarly, NIS2 introduces stricter incident reporting deadlines and governance standards, closely aligning with the UK’s own regulatory proposals (GOV.UK, 2025).

Meanwhile, the FCA and PRA continue to emphasise cyber resilience through initiatives like CBEST threat-led penetration tests, repeatedly highlighting weaknesses in how many firms integrate threat intelligence into their business units and situational awareness updates (The Guardian, 2025)

The key message is that simply ticking regulatory boxes without embedding threat intelligence strategically leaves firms exposed, not only to cyber risks but also to hefty fines, such as up to 1% of annual turnover under DORA, without genuinely improving their security posture (NAVEX, 2024).

Five Checkpoints to Improve Your Threat Intelligence

Define PIRs linked to your business interests, operating environment and systems.
Filter all intel with “So what?” unless it connects to a PIR.
Use AI for collection and processing purposes with human oversight to apply judgement, insight and source validation.
Lead with the BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front): what’s happening, why it matters, and what needs doing. It’s encourages better communication, and if your analyst can’t give you a BLUF, the intel probably isn’t worth your time. Use it to cut noise and focus the detail.
Embed TI into compliance, resilience planning, and vendor oversight.

If your current practice fails even one of these, you’re likely underleveraging your investment. If you want to learn more about making your threat intelligence more relevant to your business, external support can help give independent guidance.

Find Your Purpose

In the UK financial sector, the problem is rarely the lack of intelligence, it’s the lack of purpose behind it. Many firms run into reactive cycles, fatigue, and regulatory misalignment because they failed to start with strategic intelligence questions.

Firms that start with purpose, define PIRs, and embed intelligence into compliance, resilience, and board level strategy find that their tools become effective investments. Tools are valuable, but only when matched with sharp questions, human insight and strategic intent do they become a true defence.

Cyro Cyber helps financial services firms cut through the noise and turn intelligence into action. If you're ready to make your threat intelligence purposeful, compliant, and genuinely protective, get in touch with our team today. We’ll help you build intelligence-led resilience that not only meets regulation but gets ahead of it. Get in touch today.