With Soltra Edge, a new software offering from the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, the financial services industry hopes to better protect itself—and potentially other industries—against cybersecurity threats.

The financial space has long been intently focused on cybersecurity issues, and the industry hopes to take its efforts to a new level with a new threat-sharing platform launched Tuesday.

This week, the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) and a key tech company in the sector, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), announced the launch of Soltra Edge through their for-profit Soltra partnership. The system, which comes in both free-to-license and premium formats, converts threat information into standardized data that is then widely shared with financial services firms.

The platform emphasizes interoperability and open standards and is said to be much faster than FS-ISAC’s current approach, which can take hours to spread information. Soltra Edge is meant to streamline and automate the process.

“My team gets 40 emails a day from various people around the globe about suspicious emails and websites they’ve seen,” Mark Clancy, CEO of Soltra and chief information security officer of DTCC, told American Banker last month. “We take that information and cut and paste it from the email system into the dozens of security modules we have.”

While the product is designed for the financial services space, Bill Nelson, who serves as president and CEO of FS-ISAC and president of Soltra, says the application could be used in other sectors too.

“While Soltra Edge leverages deep cybersecurity expertise from the financial services sector, we expect this solution to be adopted broadly by many critical sectors such as healthcare, energy, transportation, retail, and many others,” Nelson said in a news release.

Financial trade groups generally welcomed the Soltra effort. Doug Johnson, senior vice president of payments and cybersecurity policy at the American Bankers Association, called the endeavor “a game changer.”

“Information sharing has demonstrated its value in defending against recent cyberattacks,” Johnson said. “The automated, systemic, and collaborative approach offered by Soltra Edge helps underpin that information sharing. I see many institutions, from the smallest to the largest, ultimately adopting and using STIX and TAXII [open] standards and taking advantage of all that Soltra Edge has to offer.”

Soltra Edge can be downloaded from the Soltra website.

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