A Blockchain Enabled System for Enhancing Fintech Industry of the Core Banking Systems

Abstract

The Financial Technologies (Fintech) plays a major role in transforming traditional financial institutions. Although it disrupts them, fintech enables these traditional financial institutions to reduce costs, introduce innovative solutions and gain a competitive edge over rivals and develop new digital technology and infrastructure, which increase the dependency on digital systems. The stronger dependence on these new technologies widens the cyber threat landscape towards digital systems/assets and these institutions. This landscape is rapidly increasing and getting more complex. Threat actors are becoming more organized, sophisticated, and cyber-crime has been commercialized. WannaCry, one of the recent large-scale cyber-attacks with global impact was an example of how vulnerabilities can be used in attacks for financial gains. This paper aims to critically analyze the spectrum of cyber threats facing the digital financial sector and illustrate the distributed ledger as an appealing solution which protects the database with its immutable property, as one of the most important assets to digital banking and its’ data. A blockchain model is illustrated to show how the technology can lead to safer implementation, enhanced operations, and to reduced exposure to cyber threats.