On the Adoption of Homomorphic Encryption by Financial Institutions*

Financial institutions collect, control and process sensitive data, either personally or commercially. These data are vital for many purposes, including business process optimisation, tailored services to individuals and organisations, and preventing fraud or other misuse of the financial system. While an institution’s information is valuable, its power is amplified when combined with other data stored in different organisations horizontally, vertically or in a governance role. However, sharing data between organisations becomes difficult for commercial, legal and regulatory reasons. Privacy-enhancing Technologies (PETs) are becoming a practical solution for secure and private information sharing. One such PET, Homomorphic Encryption (HE), allows the computation over encrypted data and thus protects the confidentiality of the information while increasing its utility. This paper investigates the current position regarding the use of HE in the financial sector by analysing the LexisNexis news archive using statistical instruments on NLP and ML techniques. Our results show that the financial sector has gained momentum in discussing privacy-enhancing technology over the last few years. The discussion around this new field highlights a constantly growing match in capitalising market readiness to technology readiness.