Addressing the challenges of fintech with adoptable solutions

Banking and investing in the years to come are unlikely to resemble what they looked like or how they worked for our grandparents. An enormous amount of data and a high rate of digitization continue to transform the landscape of the financial services sector and how customers engage with it. Ubiquitous and vast varieties of data, combined with the sector's reliance on technology, pose new challenges, threats and vulnerabilities. The newly formed industry-guided research center, the Center for Research toward Advancing Financial Technologies (CRAFT), funded by the National Science Foundation's Industry-University Cooperative Research Center Program, is setting out to leverage the opportunities for advancement and innovation in the industry and to address the many threats and vulnerabilities it faces. At a launch event for CRAFT in the fall of 2021, industry leaders discussed many examples of such pressing challenges and research opportunities.