FinTrust: Trust Engineering for the Financial Industry

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The FinTech industry is one of the major growth industries in the United Kingdom. These companies create new, cheaper and faster services, utilizing the latest technologies such as cloud, mobile and blockchain. To succeed they need to gain the trust of customers in a period that society's trust in the financial industry is still impacted by the mortgage crisis almost a decade ago. They need to gain this trust while technologies are changing rapidly and data breaches are continuously in the news. FinTrust will research the issue of trust in FinTech, identifying the generic research challenges and establishing fundamental research results. A particular focus will be on increased automation through the use of machine learning algorithms, which may have implications that affect consumer trust in the new services.For the first time, research results as derived in FinTrust will be made available as a Trust Engineering Tool Kit, allowing service provider, regulators and consumer organizations to assess levels of trust, quantify the extent to which trust matters to consumers and trust attitude differentiates consumers, assess bias in automated advice, establish whether algorithms may lead to financial exclusion or financial distress and protect services from erroneous algorithmic results. In our work we balance the commercial interest with society's interests, addressing issues such as financial exclusion through algorithmic bias. FinTrust offers a focused pathway to academic, societal and economic impact. Starting from the co-creation effort with Atom Bank that resulted in the proposal, we grow the Stakeholder Panel to include customer organizations, regulators and other stakeholders. We then establish a joint-up academic community in a FinTech Network, bringing together ICT, EPSRC and other research and intertwine this with existing research networks in finance and business research. We will make the software tools available freely and to a wide audience, training the research staff in interacting and public engagement to optimize the impact from our research.