Axos Bank
Axos Bank Overview
Axos Bank is a digital-centric financial institution that serves customers throughout the United States with a wide range of banking services. From online checking and savings to lending and investment products, the bank aims to simplify financial management through technology and accessibility.
With a foundation built on strength and service, Axos Bank has continued to adapt its offerings to support evolving customer needs while maintaining a focus on convenience and modern financial tools. This commitment to innovation underpins not only its customer-facing services but also how the organization approaches internal priorities such as protecting data and managing risk, including the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) across the business.
Challenges
Achieve full visibility into where sensitive data exists and how it moves, across every application, business unit, and now every AI tool employees adopt.
Classify data accurately enough to trust it. Regex-based classification produced so many false positives that the security team spent more time weeding out noise than acting on real risk.
Know what data is safe to feed into AI, and what data, such as payroll or other confidential records, should never reach an AI tool in the first place.
Answer basic ownership and provenance questions, such as who owns a piece of data, why it exists, and whether it is still within retention limits, when no single person in the organization can answer them.
Overview
Axos Bank operates in a highly regulated financial services environment where managing risk is fundamental to business success. As AI adoption accelerated across the bank, from technology teams to legal, marketing, and sales, the security team faced a new version of an old problem: it could not protect data it could not see, classify, or trust. For Chief Information Security Officer Raghu Valipireddy, data security posture management (DSPM) represented the missing piece.
“If we need to be successful, we need to have full visibility into what data we have in the organization, what controls are being applied to those, and how confident we are that all of these protections are directly addressing wherever data sits, or wherever data is moving. So, in my view, DSPM is like a nirvana, right? It's like an ultimate solution that needs to paint a picture of how all of these are coming together.”
Challenge and Impact
Axos Bank operates in a highly regulated financial services environment where managing risk is fundamental to business success. For Valipireddy, success in his role is directly tied to protecting the organization from risk and ensuring the business can operate securely.
"In my role, success is defined by mitigation of risks. At the end of the day, we are successful as a business only when we can protect our sales enterprise from all of those risks."
— Raghu Valipireddy, CISO, Axos Bank
Those risks are consistently connected to data, both internal data and customer data. But the calculus started to change as AI tools emerged in every corner of the business.
"Everybody's using AI, and guess what? AI needs data. So, we're busy building all of these connections internally to pump all of this data to AI. That's great, because AI needs data to be productive, but there's also a risk that we as security professionals should worry about. For example, we don't want to give our payroll data to AI, because that would be causing a lot of drama if we were to allow that to happen."
— Raghu Valipireddy, CISO, Axos Bank
Without a tool that could tell the security team what data existed and where it was headed, Axos Bank could not answer a simple question with confidence: What data is being fed to AI, and what is not?
Compounding the problem, the legacy classification methods available to Valipireddy's team prior to working with Cyberhaven were not reliable enough to act on.
Low-accuracy classification meant the team could not confidently apply controls to specific data. The default became applying protections broadly across the environment, an approach that limits efficiency and makes risk harder to manage with precision.
Solution
AI Closes the Gap Between Seeing Data and Controlling It
See data at rest and in motion
Cyberhaven combines data loss prevention (DLP) and data security posture management (DSPM) so Axos Bank can see both data in motion and data at rest, and apply controls that reflect where data lives and moves across human and agentic workflows, rather than where it is assumed to be.
"I'm confident in saying that Cyberhaven is probably the only vendor that really brings these two core product features, DLP and DSPM, together to make a whole solution very compelling and very powerful."
— Raghu Valipireddy, CISO, Axos Bank
Cut false positives with AI-driven classification
By applying AI to classification instead of regular expressions alone, Cyberhaven raised accuracy significantly. That shift lets the security team trust what the data is telling them and act on it, rather than spending their time filtering out noise, especially with the large volumes of unstructured data every organization holds.
“What Cyberhaven’s AI capability does to the DSPM is bring the accuracy levels to pretty high numbers of 90-plus percent, compared to regular expressions, which probably, in my opinion, low 20%. Now we, as security professionals, can look at this data and actually see less false positives, so that we're compelled to look at this information, make decisions, and actually use it."
— Raghu Valipireddy, CISO, Axos Bank
Know what is safe to send to AI
DSPM gives Axos Bank a way to answer the question that AI adoption raises across the business: what data should never reach an AI tool?
"How do we understand what data is being fed to AI, what data is not being fed to AI? We go back to a tool like DSPM to say, hey, this is payroll data, it should never be going to AI. Without a tool like that, we are at risk of feeding all of this data to AI and watering down the security that we have always put around those data silos."
— Raghu Valipireddy, CISO, Axos Bank
Add provenance and context to every data point
Knowing that data exists is only the starting point. Cyberhaven helps answer the ownership and lifecycle questions that determine what to do with it next.
"Knowing that the data sits there is powerful, but there's still a lot of open questions. Who owns this? What is the purpose? Is anyone accessing it or not? Where did it come from? Was this a copy of something else? Those are all the questions that provenance can actually help answer, because there is no one person in the company that can answer all these questions."
— Raghu Valipireddy, CISO, Axos Bank
Get to value in minutes, not months
Axos Bank also saw a fast path from deployment to daily use.
"Cyberhaven was incredibly powerful in the sense that I could start applying or using the tool within the first few minutes, as opposed to a huge learning curve some of the other tools would have. It's pretty rare for a security product to do something like this, and that's one thing that really stuck to me immediately."
— Raghu Valipireddy, CISO, Axos Bank
Looking Ahead
As Axos Bank continues to mature its security program, Valipireddy sees AI as the layer that makes DLP and DSPM work together instead of in isolation, translating both into terms the rest of the business can act on.
"It's rare for a security product to master the art of data in motion as well as data at rest, and then layer AI on top of both DLP and DSPM to provide that context and answer the questions the business would have in a business language. That's a clear differentiator from all of the other products in this world."
— Raghu Valipireddy, CISO, Axos Bank
Axos Bank also credits the relationship with Cyberhaven's team as part of what keeps the platform aligned to how the bank actually works.
"Cyberhaven is always eager to help customers like us, hop on a call and walk us through those things. More importantly, listen to us as far as what features we would find more useful versus less useful. That indicates to us that a vendor is not just putting a product out there and saying go and use it as we imagine, but eager to listen to our views and make sure our feedback is taken into consideration to shape the product roadmap."
— Raghu Valipireddy, CISO, Axos Bank
Conclusion
Axos Bank's focus on managing risk is central to its security strategy, and AI adoption has made that focus more urgent, not less. With Cyberhaven, the security team can see where sensitive data lives, classify it with enough accuracy to trust, and know with confidence what should and should not reach an AI tool. That clarity lets Axos Bank support the business's AI ambitions without losing control of the data those tools depend on.
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