Brenda Ferraro: Enabling
Betterments for Safe Cyber Spaces
Reliability is required for one to feel protected from every potential threat. It initially begins with parents and slowly, as it turns out, becomes essential in every instance –from consuming food to using technology
While the present cuisines are traced and doubly layered at every step of the process to ensure safety, one may wonder about the elements that are ensuring consumer protection in the new age of the internet world. As per current statistics, the internet has become a vulnerable spot for everyone – from children to the elderly Apart from
its social repercussions, it hurts the global economy, too, costing the world around $10 4 trillion annually by 2025
But global leaders are curating a durable, cost-effective, and stronger solution than the rising incidences of multiple types of cyber-attacks.
One such leader is Head of Technology Third Party Governance – Brenda Ferraro, who made a 360-degree turn in her career choices from first selecting arts to now managing complex third party programs. Marching forward with her passion in the field and resolving the ever-emerging technological challenges, she is fabricating an internet world that is secure for everyone
This purpose is enhanced by her active role in Wells Fargo, a company that is providing its customers with secured financial services and simplifying lives with everyday checks They aim to protect account holders from any kind of threat in the financial sector. Let us dive to read more about how Brenda is leading change in this sector!
The Unfolding
Brenda’s journey as a business leader, throughout her career to the position at Wells Fargo, was not a traditional one. She had to face challenges as a female in a world where there are 15 percent or fewer female leaders; what she brought to the table was experience rather than a degree.
Talking about the process and subsequent accomplishments because of this approach, she shares, “Early on in my career, executives took notice of my ability to break down processes and reconstruct them by removing delay and waste. I was sent off to receive a process mastery certification which I leveraged to drive innovations and influence skills to enhance processes using cutting edge techniques to eliminate risk out of the third-party ecosystem.”
Over the years, Brenda learned how to properly navigate the cyber security world through tenacity and surrounding herself with people who thrived on making a difference, which helped turn her into a third-party risk and incident management strategic anomaly.
Embarking with a Mission
Wells Fargo’s Technology embodies a 6-S Strategy as their vision to foster paths of new frontiers, powered by a mission to deliver – stable, secure, scalable, and innovative services at speeds that delight and satisfy the customers and unleash the potential and skills of the employees. She is influencing the Technology Third Party Governance modernization program as the new frontier for Third Party Governance. She believes that recognizing the current way of doing business worked well in the past, but it is also a ripe time for taking the process and workflow and transitioning to a more modern transformation.
While briefing about the company’s services, she says, “Our program functions and techniques are being refocused on how we partner with our Third Parties. The cutting
edge, not best practice, builds in fundamentals of what we call – continuous evaluation and real time risk management”
Because of this, she states, “Questionnaire and survey responses will be reduced, and questionnaire fatigue will be history due to a capability where third party questionnaire responses can be harmonized with threat intelligence and other means to better understand third party risk assurance As a part of governance, the machine learning and artificial intelligence reporting will be on steroids due to the Key Risk, Performance, and Control indicators captured for transparency in Metrics & Measures to heighten risk management awareness.”
Starting from Arts to Now in Cybersecurity – The Motivation Behind
Back when Brenda was attending high school into college, she did not have third-party risk management as her career of choice She says, “I wanted to be a triple threat in the art of music, singing, and theater. The thought of cyber security, third party, incident management, and process management never once crossed my mind.”
She supposed that focusing on the arts provided her with the ability to think ahead, gave her the platform to speak in front of people, and learn about how to create grandiose things.
Throughout her career, she has had the pleasure to help define and design strategies at large and medium-sized companies of every sector She started in the financial industry and found her way back to the industry but with a different twist towards banking. Sharing her moment of realization, she says, “I was caught off guard with the compliance and regulatory requirements that banks are subject to uphold. I quickly
discovered how critical and important control management is for the banks. I found myself pulled back into the financial sector when I was asked to help Wells Fargo transform their Technology Third Party Governance program.”
For her, this is not a job; it is a love for creating something big, something different, something exciting and new Even something that other third-party programs, industry agnostic, will want to use to help drive risk out of their ecosystem as well.
Cultivating/ Habituating to Dynamism with Values
Brenda thinks that transforming an organization from doing what they are used to for many decades to embarking on a future of cutting-edge techniques is a huge occasion for the organization as well as its employees.
For this, the key elements and strengths that she looks for in the people and culture are the ability to change, do things differently, and make a difference for not only themselves or their department but also for others outside their area of control. This, she thinks, should be supplemented with the values of sincerity, logic, trust, and the ability to get things done at a rapid pace without complaint.
She comments, “Time can be a transformation’s and a modernization’s worst enemy. It takes courage and the ability to see past the norm to create something that has not been done before. The strength to beat all odds seems so cliché; however, that is what is required to become better than the best and better than great”