Data access controls for sensitive financial information refer to the policies and technologies that ensure only the right people can view or use financial data.Banking and financial institutions have struggled to keep sensitive data secure in recent years.
Protecting this data starts with visibility and control across your entire ecosystem. This article will explore:
- The nature of sensitive financial information
- Various methods and strategies for implementing data access controls
- How metadata and metadata-enabled features play a big role in securing sensitive financial information
Table of contents #
- What is sensitive financial information?
- Why set up data access controls for sensitive financial information?
- What are the various measures for securing sensitive financial information?
- What are the different types of data access controls for sensitive financial information?
- How can Atlan help with data access controls for sensitive financial information?
- Data access controls for sensitive financial information: Summary
- Data access controls for sensitive financial information: Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
What is sensitive financial information? #
Financial information is practically part of all organizations that are selling goods and services because they capture, store, process, and possibly share financial data in various shapes and forms.
Some examples of financial information are:
- Public annual reports, internal annual performance reports
- Granular transaction data, aggregated transaction data
- Tax returns, lodgement details, arrears, refunds, and penalties
- Employment details, payroll data, and superannuation data
- Unique numbers like social security number, healthcare number, credit, and debit card details
While all of these are examples of financial information, not all of them can be considered sensitive.
For instance, public annual reports, aggregated transactional data, and employment details (without any other sensitive details) are generally not considered sensitive financial information.
Other categories, such as granular transaction data, credit scores, tax returns, and social security numbers, are considered sensitive because they can be tied back to an individual’s financial activity.
Why set up data access controls for sensitive financial information? #
Banking and financial institutions have struggled to keep financial data safe over the last few years. The 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found that there were over 3300 incidents, over 900 of which had confirmed data disclosure in the financial and insurance sector.
These sectors handle sensitive financial information, which includes personally identifiable information (PII) data, as well as behavioral and transactional data. Protecting sensitive financial information first requires visibility and control over all data assets in your organization’s tools, technologies, and data ecosystem. Once that’s in place, you can employ governance and access control for all systems and personas that use access, both internally and externally.
This governance and access control for an organization utilizing numerous tools and processes is not typically limited to role-based access control, but also encompasses various other methods and strategies. Let’s explore this topic further.
What are the various measures for securing sensitive financial information? #
There are many methods that you can use to secure sensitive financial information for your organization. These aren’t usually alternatives to each other. Rather, they work on different levels, giving you several lines of defence to protect your data.
Here are the most common solutions to protecting data, in brief:
- Advanced encryption at rest and in transit using algorithms like AES-256
- Hardened authentication using SSO, SCIM, and MFA
- Access control policies using policies, roles, attributes, tags, etc.
- Granular controls on data access using row and column-level security
- Special handling of sensitive data in compliance with laws & regulations
- Proactive monitoring of threats, leakage, and fraudulent activity
While all of these methods are important, having strict data access controls is crucial to securing sensitive financial information. That’s why the next section will take you through the various types of data access controls and roughly how they can be implemented within your organization.
What are the different types of data access controls for sensitive financial information? #
Similar to the methods described above, different data access control methods also operate at various levels. However, there is sometimes an overlap between these access control permissions, which is where precedence comes into play.
There are dozens of access control methods like relationship-based access control (ReBAC), tag-based access control (TBAC), and context-based access control (CBAC), among others.
The most widely used and time-tested methods are the following five:
- Mandatory access control (MAC) is the most uncompromising layer of access control because it typically deals with fully automated laws and regulations-based approval or denial of access, allowing very minimal human intervention, which is usually reserved for the highest levels. This type of access control can be seen in high-security facilities and government departments.
- Role-based access control (RBAC) is the method that allows you to control access on a coarse level using users, groups, roles, and sessions, among other things. In most scenarios involving sensitive financial information, RBAC alone is insufficient; it is typically combined with attribute-based access control.
- Attribute-based access control (ABAC) is the method that gives you the flexibility of defining attributes relevant to your organization, especially when implementing internal and external barriers to secure financial information. Attributes could include time range, employment type, minimum employment, device, location, among other things.
- Policy-based access control (PBAC) is the method that often brings one or more types of access control together and defines access control rules in a policy using a policy engine like Open Policy Agent or something similar. One key thing to note about PBAC is that it enforces policy application at runtime, preventing risks of offline access.
- Discretionary access control (DAC) is a special case of ReBAC, where the owner of the object is allowed to grant access to data to other users. It functions very similarly to how, in Notion, Google Drive, or other similar platforms, you can share the document you own with anyone you like. In other words, the access control is fully at your discretion.
Between these five, you can implement a very strong data access control strategy for sensitive financial information across and even outside your organization. However, all the access control methods need a metadata foundation to define the roles, attributes, policies, relationships, and other conditions, which is why access control needs to be metadata-driven.
To drive access control using metadata, you need a single place where metadata from all your data assets gets accumulated, which allows you to search, discover, and govern data from the same place, i.e., a metadata control plane for your organization. That’s where a tool like Atlan comes into the picture.
Let’s look at how Altan can help you secure sensitive financial information.
How can Atlan help with data access controls for sensitive financial information? #
To begin with, Atlan has all of the measures in place that were discussed earlier, such as SSO, SCIM, encryption, and compliance, among other things. Moreover, it offers a range of features that provide very fine-grained access controls.
Here are a few examples, where you can:
- Create personas and purposes to employ a mix of RBAC and DAC for coarse-grained access to assets that contain financial information. This becomes one of the lines of defence.
- Explicitly deny data access to employ something similar to mandatory access control, but within the organization. This is useful for protecting data from disgruntled employees or compromised accounts.
- Mask data just in time to ensure that the required policies are applied to the data being previewed or used before the end user sees or accesses the data.
- Restrict access to data at the column level, as it is one of the most important aspects of fine-grained financial data security. You can protect data in specific columns that contain PII, transactional, and other sensitive information.
- Apply tag-based policies for data access control, syncing tag-based data access controls with various data platforms, such as Databricks and Snowflake.
- Create automated policy compliance and governance workflows to streamline data access management, alerts, notifications, approvals, and other tasks.
With all of these features powered by a metadata control plane, you get all the tools and frameworks that you need to secure your organization’s sensitive financial data. For more information, please visit Atlan’s website to learn more about data privacy and confidentiality.
Data access controls for sensitive financial information: Summary #
Data privacy and security, especially when it comes to sensitive financial information, are paramount, as any data loss or leakage can result in massive reputational damage and legal action. This is why you need to have strict guardrails in place to ensure there are several lines of defence for securing financial information.
All the methods and strategies we discussed in this article are based on a foundation of metadata, which Atlan provides through its metadata control plane. Atlan also integrates with source, target, data quality, and observability tools to give you full control over your data.
Learn more about the integrations on Atlan’s official website.
Data access controls for sensitive financial information: Frequently asked questions (FAQs) #
1. What counts as sensitive financial information? #
Sensitive financial information includes data that can be tied back to an individual’s financial activity—like social security numbers, granular transaction records, credit scores, and tax returns. Public summaries or anonymized aggregates generally don’t fall under this category.
2. Why do you need data access controls for sensitive financial information? #
Without strong access controls, sensitive financial data is exposed to breaches, insider threats, and non-compliance. These controls reduce unauthorized access and help meet regulatory requirements while building customer trust.
3. What’s the difference between RBAC, ABAC, and PBAC? #
RBAC uses roles to control access; ABAC adds flexibility by incorporating user and resource attributes; PBAC goes further by enforcing dynamic policies at runtime. Each adds a layer of precision to your access strategy.
4. What are some of the techniques you can use for securing sensitive financial information? #
In addition to strict data access controls, there are a host of techniques that you can use for securing sensitive financial information, such as data masking, anonymization, pseudonymization, minimization, and tokenization, all of which deal with removing or replacing, either partially or in full, the sensitive information from the data assets based on access control models.
5. What are some of the common data security standards and regulations for financial information? #
Some of the most widely enforced standards and regulations are PCI-DSS (for card payments), HIPAA (for healthcare-related financial data), SOX (for financial disclosures), and GLBA (for sensitive personal financial information). These are usually combined with broader regulations, such as GDPR, CCPA, APRA, PIPEDA, and others.
6. What are some best practices for securing sensitive financial information? #
It is best to adopt the principles of zero-trust and least privilege when handling sensitive financial information. On top of that, you should also encrypt data at rest and in transit, and proactively monitor and audit any suspicious activity, specifically for data assets that contain financial data like banking details, transactions, among other things.
7. How does metadata support access controls? #
Metadata helps define who should access what, under which conditions. It powers tags, roles, policies, and relationships—core to dynamic, context-aware access control at scale.
8. How does Atlan help secure sensitive financial information? #
Atlan enables fine-grained access controls through persona-based roles, tag-based policies, column-level security, and runtime masking—powered by centralized metadata context. It also automates compliance workflows to streamline governance.