CHALLENGES FOR THE PROTECTION OF CRITICAL ITC-BASED FINANCIAL INFRASTRUCTURES FOR THE NEXT 5 YEARS

"Protection of Massively Distributed Critical Financial Services" and "Trust in New Value Added Business Chains"

Workshop in Frankfurt, 24-25 September 2007
(special invitation only)

The rapid growth and deployment of information and communication technologies (ICTs) that we are experiencing today is having profound impact on the financial service industry. On the one hand, the ICT infrastructures over which critical financial services are being delivered are becoming ever more interconnected, open and ubiquitous, but at the same time, ever more fragile and vulnerable to failure and cyber-attacks. On the other hand, over the coming few years, it is expected that in the financial sector, the level of self-service will become significantly higher than today, with ubiquitous and mobile banking becoming strong market drivers. Industrialisation, outsourcing and number of intervening actors in the service value creation chain will further increase, changing the way financial services will be composed and delivered, while continuing to guarantee their very high-level of trustworthiness. This in turn, would require: increased readiness of service providers or banks and new levels of trust in the value chain, with severe constraints over business continuity management. And, security and privacy in both the clients and the client advisors behaviour will be a key success factor for banking and more broadly, for the financial industry.

In view of the above, the aim of this specific workshop is to provide a platform for a structured strategic dialogue between stakeholders from the financial industry and distinguished experts from ICT security and trust. The focus will be on:

  • Debating how the situation in the European financial sector will evolve over the next 5 years in the two main themes of the workshop: protection of massively distributed critical financial infrastructures; and, trust in new added value business chains;
  • Developing joint scenarios and consequent strategic plans and research directions on how future trustworthy financial services could be constructed and delivered over critical ICT-based service infrastructures and how these latter could be protected from any kind of cyber-threat.

The workshop will address issues that span beyond a single financial institution or national market. It will address specifically cross boarder and multi member state issues and correlations which may impact or destabilize critical ICT-based financial infrastructures of the European economy.

The expected workshop outcomes are twofold:

  1. Nurture the dialogue between the relevant actors and stimulate the creation of potential consortia in view of the EU's FP7 call for R&D proposals in the area of critical infrastructure protection, including the protection of ICT-based critical financial infrastructures (see http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/critinfpro/home_en.html );
  2. Provide input to future strategic research directions that the European Commission will support in its next work programme for ICT Research, for the period 2009-2010.

The workshop will benefit from similar work that was initiated by the European Commission in the ICT and energy sector (the CIIRCO research action – see the European Research Agenda it delivered on critical information infrastructure protection available on: http://www.ci2rco.org/downloadMaterial/IST-2004-15818%20-%20D12%20(Final).pdf .