Despite rising investments on BigData, AI and IoT in finance/insurance, financial and insurance organisations are still facing many challenges (i.e. data “silos”, regulatory complexity, lack of testbed resources) in realizing the full potential of these technologies. INFINITECH is a joint effort of global leaders in ICT and finance towards lowering the barriers for BigData/IoT/AI driven innovation, boosting regulatory compliance and stimulating additional investments. It will provide: 1)Novel BigData/IoT technologies for seamless management and querying of all types of data (e.g., OLAP/OLTP, structured/unstructured/semi-structured, data streaming & data at rest), interoperable data analytics, blockchain-based data sharing, real-time analytics, as well as libraries of advanced AI algorithms. 2)Regulatory tools incorporating various data governance capabilities (e.g. anonymization, eIDAS integration) and facilitating compliance to regulations (e.g., PSD2, 4AMLD, MIFiD II). 3)Nine novel and configurable testbeds & sandboxes, each one offering Open APIs and other resources for validating autonomous and personalized solutions, including a unique collection of data assets for finance/insurance. The project’s results will be validated in the scope of 14 high impact pilots providing complete coverage of the sectors, including Know Your Customer (KYC), customer analytics, personalized portfolio management, credit risk assessment, preventive financial crime analysis, fraud anticipation, usage based insurance, agro-insurance and more. INFINITECH will establish a market platform that will provide access to the project’s solutions, along with a Virtualized Digital Innovation Hub (VDIH) that will support innovators (FinTech/InsuranceTech) in their BigData/AI/IoT endeavors. Based on their strong footprint in the European digital finance ecosystem, the partners will engage stakeholders from all EU-28 countries, making INFINITECH synonymous to disruptive BigData/AI innovation in the target sectors.

The Digitalization Era implies many advantages for businesses and citizens. However, new threats arise, especially in what concerns data privacy and the use of digital identities. These threats must be tackled under a holistic approach and pointing at their different origins, including the human factor. The European Union is reinforcing the legal framework to contribute to this need, including important requirements to be fulfilled, especially in the context of critical sectors identified under the NIS Directive. Finance is one of them, actually the most restrictive, because of the number of regulations to comply with. This makes finance the perfect scenario for testing tools, before transferring the results to other sectors. That is why SOTER is mainly focused on it, aiming at providing a comprehensive set of tools that will act as a transformative process of the finance sector, helping their players to increase their cybersecurity level, enabling the fight against present and future cyberattacks and vulnerabilities. The results will then increase their cyber-resilience. SOTER main results will be: SOTER Digital Onboarding Platform (the technology tool to provide a robust and sovereign digital identity, facilitating the interconnections between different services providers and the users), improved by the use of blockSOTER will offer tools that are able to determine the level of cyber security that exists in a certain entity, to improve if that is the case. We intend to get this through a comprehensive risk analysis to create contingency plans and direct action measures that can mitigate threats and security attacks. In the case of the finance sector, we propose to test and analyze a cloud platform of Digital Onboarding with two main features: • use of technologies blockchain • innovative systems of biometric identification of users Derived from this, training actions for end users will be generated so they are able to detect and deal with this type of threats.

The infrastructures of the financial sector are nowadays more critical, sophisticated and interconnected than ever before, which makes them increasingly vulnerable to security attacks. Despite increased security, most security measures remain fragmented and static i.e. inappropriate for confronting sophisticated and asymmetric attacks. FINSEC is a joint effort of prominent stakeholders in the financial sector and global leaders in physical & IT security, towards introducing a novel standards-based reference architecture (RA) for integrated (cyber & physical) security. The RA will enable timely preparation against attacks, while at the same time facilitating stakeholders’ collaboration for risk assessment/mitigation in the financial supply chain, as a means of confronting complex threats and their cascading effects. FINSEC will provide a mature implementation of the RA, based on the enhancement and integration of novel solutions of the partners (eg., Anomaly Detection, AI CCTV Analytics, Risk Assessment Engines, Collaborative Risk Analysis & Management, Compliance), which will be bundled in a toolbox. The RA implementation and the toolbox will be validated through realistic pilots involving stakeholders in the identification, assessment and mitigation of threats. The five pilots involve high-impact scenarios including SWIFT network protection, buildings and ATM networks security, peer-to-peer payments network protection, risk assessment for insurance purposes and securing financial SMEs. The pilots will engage >=500 security & finance experts, while providing a representative coverage of the financial services industry (ie. banking, capital management, insurance, card & P2P payments), which is a sound basis for FINSEC’s broader impact. Towards maximum impact, FINSEC will establish an ecosystem of security solutions for the financial sector, which will be supported by the partners’ dense network of sales, marketing, standardization and regulation channels worldwide.