News release 17 March 2025 – 8/2025

FIN-FSA’s Annual Report 2024: Cybersecurity and fraud prevention were top of agenda

In 2024, weak economic development and prolonged geopolitical tensions kept risks in Finland’s financial sector at an elevated level. The strong solvency of our supervised entities continued to provide protection against the risks brought by a deteriorating operating environment.

Geopolitical tensions, combined with the changes brought about by digitalisation and artificial intelligence, are making cybersecurity an increasingly important part of our supervision. Towards the end of the year under review, cybersecurity was shaken, in particular, by an exceptionally large-scale denial-of-service attack in the financial sector and by cable failures in the Baltic Sea.

 “By strengthening resilience in advance, we minimise the impact of such attacks or damage on our society and at the same time weaken the effectiveness of criminal actions,” says FIN-FSA Director General Tero Kurenmaa in his review.

The importance of cyber security and related resilience is underlined in all of the sectors supervised by the FIN-FSA. In 2024, led by the European Central Bank, cyber resilience was tested in the banking sector, and this year testing will be extended nationally to cover other supervised sectors.

The proliferation of scams and their increasingly professional nature was also evident during the year.

 “Banks must also take more responsibility for preventing fraud by making it as difficult as possible for fraudsters. It would be important for banks and other actors to build protections against fraud into their services: for example, bank transfer restrictions set by customers themselves are possible within the framework of current legislation,” says Kurenmaa.

The FIN-FSA’s Annual Report covers, among other things, the state of the financial sector, as well as supervision, which is changing along with the operating environment. In addition, the Annual Report outlines key observations for 2024 from blogs, releases and online news on the following themes:

  • Sustainability aspects of the financial sector
  • New supervised entities in the prevention of money laundering and terrorist financing
  • Supervision of cybersecurity and fraud prevention
  • Banking supervision: the tenth anniversary of the Single Supervisory Mechanism
  • Stress tests and governance inspections conducted in the insurance sector.

The Annual Report is published as a website (in Finnish), and it will also be published in Swedish and English later in the spring.

Requests for interviews are coordinated by

FIN-FSA Communications, tel. +358 9 183 5030, Mon-Fri 9.00–16.00.

Read the reports: