2018 has marked a further maturity in the development and deployment of key technologies when it comes to finance. From blockchain to biometrics, the march of technological progress goes hand in hand with the drive for security.

Here are the top technology trends boosting finance security to be aware of:

Blockchain

Blockchain technology reduces costs, minimizes complexity and increases the speed of trading and settlement processes, creating an immutable real-time record of transactions. Blockchain is bringing trust and transparency to those who long for tech solutions that are as adept at fraud prevention as some of the offline solutions used by businesses to protect their paperwork.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now making real strides, with algorithms that can spot and stop fraudulent activity by learning to analyse key trends in behaviour. That’s especially important as a line of defence for business in the face of an increasingly sophisticated cyber security threat.

Encryption

Encryption scrambles text together to make it undecipherable to anyone other than those with the key to decode it. It’s a must for businesses with sensitive information if they want to stand a chance of protecting it from prying eyes.

Biometrics

Biometric identification has helped to remove some of the concerns about password management. Instead of a guessable number code, people using smartphones can easily prevent access to their sensitive information using touch ID, iris scanning and facial and voice recognition.

Poor password management is a weakness when it comes to digital finance – for consumers and businesses alike – and these developments can eliminate some of this. The challenge is to be able to do this on scale – and for devices beyond smartphones too so that they can be embedded in more and more workplaces.

The cloud

The cloud might have had its breakthrough moment years ago, but its use continues to both increase and get safer and more effective. Ignore this and you ignore one of the most important security trends.

The cloud keeps your financial data more secure because:

  • It has stricter access requirements that should make it harder for the wrong people to see the wrong information.
  • Your data is stored by your cloud provider with round-the-clock security and this often means that your important information isn’t ‘kept on site’ with the risk of attracting .
  • Using cloud applications means you develop a threat assessment model that evaluates vulnerabilities within the applications, tries to breach them and make them stronger.

In short, it’s an environment in which many of the other advances can flourish and any ways to fine tune its capabilities will continue to be gobbled up by companies and individuals which already use it.