Crédit Agricole Consumer Finance launches season 2 of its Start & Pulse open innovation competition

The Corporate Centre competition: a call for innovative Edtech solutions to raise its employees’ awareness of cybersecurity issues.

For several years now, IT companies and their ecosystems have been disrupting the way we communicate, work, interact and share our data. The digital revolution and the emergence of new technologies and interfaces from innovative actors have also encouraged our customers, partners and employees to adopt new habits and expectations. The revolution has given rise not only to new service and response time standards, but also to new business models and ways of working. To meet these key adaptation challenges, which now determine whether a company survives or fails, innovation has become the crucial aspect of corporate strategy. In many cases, innovation requires numerous networking operations involving large databases – the black gold of our times – which are now processed with the help of big data and artificial intelligence. 

As a result, companies’ technical infrastructures, including those of banks, have inevitably opened up: data flows via APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), connecting multiple databases and tools, and enabling the use of new technologies and services, have grown hugely in volume. Hermetic data centres, company firewalls and security protocols are still with us, but they have had to adapt to this new reality. At the same time, the number of projects requiring ever more networking operations grows by the day. This also increases the attack surface, forcing companies to change their cultures and practices in response to cyberthreats.

In this context, characterised by continuous and rapid information flows, it is imperative that we protect against these threats: there have never been so many risks from cyberattacks that are growing in number, diversity and sophistication. 

In this regard, the figures in support of these assertions are conclusive: 30% of cyberattacks worldwide target banks (2017 Cost of Cybercrime Study, Accenture) and… 95% of cybersecurity vulnerabilities are linked to human error (Cybint Solutions). For this reason, it is vital that companies pursuing their digital transformation raise employees’ awareness of the inherent risks of cybersecurity and the need to adopt best practices in order to limit risks

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How can we embrace the ecosystem and be more innovative and effective without jeopardising the integrity of our data?

The Corporate Centre, the CA Consumer Finance group's steering unit, in partnership with Cap Digital and as part of the international Start & Pulse competition, therefore intends to join forces with a start-up that will rise to the challenge of trialling training-related engineering solutions and raise its employees’ awareness of cybersecurity issues in an innovative and enduring manner. 

In return, the winner can expect an endowment of €30,000 to produce a prototype, and to be listed as an approved supplier by the Crédit Agricole group, as well as an enhanced European profile thanks to potential partnerships with our international entities. Enter the Start & Pulse competition!

The competition is open from 30 April to 24 May 2019.