Winning Together: How CISOs and CTOs Can Maximize Innovation

At the recent Atlanta CIO Executive Summit, Equifax Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Jamil Farshchi led the opening keynote session, along with Chief Information and Digital Officer Naveen Krishna of Genuine Parts, on aligning IT and security to drive innovation. They shared strategies for building this alignment, overcoming common misconceptions about security and enabling early integration between IT and security to improve efficiency. Here, Jamil shares some key takeaways from the session.

Gartner C-level Communities’ 2025 Leadership Perspective Survey for CIOs reveals "Cybersecurity" as the #1 priority for the fourth straight year, with "Delivering AI Value" surging to #2. CIOs are simultaneously tasked with protecting the enterprise and pioneering its future, navigating two imperatives that demand equal focus. So, how do we manage this paradox? We start by reframing the entire debate.
 

Security and Innovation are Symbiotic

Having led both the security and technology functions at Equifax, my biggest takeaway is this: Security and innovation aren’t just compatible, they’re symbiotic. That partnership, reinforced by our current CISO, is a powerful engine driving our growth.

We’ve all encountered the classic friction points: concerns about achieving patch rate goals, compliance coverage targets, and pipeline standardization. The great news? These obstacles aren't technical; they're organizational. When we unify our efforts, those limitations transform into achieved business results. At Equifax, as we executed our multi-year, approximately $3B cloud transformation, we realized that the same cultural mindset that drove our security leadership was a recipe to achieve technology excellence.

We brought the same urgency and rigor we use for threat response to our everyday technology deployments. By the end of September 2025, we’d securely launched over 150 new products for the year, which is the most product launches ever through the third quarter. This year, the number of new products launched using EFX.AI is also up 3x since 2023.

And our technical capabilities allow us to scale our security in numerous other ways, driving new efficiencies in the process. For example, we’re actively fusing AI into our threat detection, which has helped us reduce our mean time to detect (MTTD) threats to under a single minute.
 

Enabling Frictionless User Experience

Our passwordless transformation also epitomized the value of our Technology and Security teams’ strong collaboration. We made the calculated decision to support the development of passwordless technology during its formative stages, co-innovating with our vendor. By deploying passwordless authentication to all of our nearly 22,000 employees and contractors globally, we made logins at Equifax quicker and more secure than ever, mitigating one of the top security threat vectors.

A fundamental goal of technology is to deliver a world-class user experience, and for us, that experience includes non-negotiable, industry-leading security. We see this as a welcome design challenge: It ensures that our best, most secure solutions are simultaneously the most seamless for our users and developers.
 

Community is the Performance Multiplier

This is the playbook we've built. But the most effective playbooks aren't built alone; they are built with peers. And, in today's landscape, the lines between the CTO and CISO executives are blurring — in a good way.

We don’t see security as an obligatory subset of technology; we see it as a driving force. CISOs are expanding into technology roles, and CTOs are adopting security playbooks to drive operational excellence. This is where a community transforms into a performance system.

• It’s where leaders share what actually shipped, what broke, and what drove the business forward.
• It’s how we address the "lack of skills" gap that 55% of CIOs named as their top AI-specific challenge in the Gartner CIO Communities’ survey.
• It’s where one team’s hard-earned playbook for cloud migration, secure AI models, or data transformation becomes another team’s accelerator.

This is the way. True enablement means building with security from the start, not as an afterthought. And it means building with our peers, not in a vacuum. That’s why peer groups, like the Gartner CIO Community, are so essential. They provide the forum to bypass the noise and get the blueprints that matter.
 

Jamil Farshchi is Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Equifax and a Governing Body Member of the Atlanta CISO Community. To connect with like-minded C-level executives in technology and security, apply to join your local community. If you are already a member, sign in to register for upcoming community programs and events.