For years, banks worried mostly about threats coming from people. Think of stolen passwords, phishing emails, and careless clicks. That threat hasn’t gone away, unfortunately. And yet, right next to it, a bigger, quieter one has risen and overtaken the previously known cybersecurity issues. It’s called a “non-human identity,” and most people outside IT departments have never heard the term.
A non-human identity is any digital credential that lets one computer system talk to another without a person typing a password. This can be an API key that lets a budgeting app pull your transaction history from your bank, or a background service that moves money between accounts automatically. Every open banking connection, every embedded finance partnership, and every payment integration runs on these machine-to-machine links.
There are now far more of these machine identities inside a typical financial institution than there are employees. Each one is a small door into the bank’s systems. Most of those doors are never checked once they’re built.
Attackers have noticed. According to Akamai’s 2026 API Security Impact Study, 96% of financial services firms surveyed reported at least one API security incident in the previous 12 months, the highest rate of any industry the study covered.
A separate study points to the same shift. Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report, based on more than 22,000 confirmed breaches worldwide, found that breaches involving a third party jumped 60% year over year and now account for nearly half of all breaches analyzed. In banking, “third party” usually means a vendor’s API, a partner’s service account, or a piece of outsourced software with standing access to sensitive systems.
Why this matters for banking specifically
Open banking and embedded finance only work because banks let outside companies plug into their systems through APIs. That convenience is also the exposure. A single overlooked or forgotten API key can give an attacker the same access as the system it was built for, without needing to guess anyone’s password.
What regulators and banks are expected to require
Security specialists point to three practices likely to become standard, and eventually mandatory, across banking regulation:
- Just-in-time (JIT) access: machine credentials are granted only for the moment they’re needed, then automatically revoked.
- API key lifecycle management: every key is tracked, rotated on a schedule, and retired when a service is decommissioned.
- Zero-trust architecture: no system, human or machine, is trusted by default, even inside the bank’s own network.
The next major banking breach is less likely to start with a tricked employee than with an unmonitored connection between two computers. For CISOs and infrastructure teams, managing machine identities is becoming as central to bank security as managing customer passwords once was.
