Towards Secure FinTech: A Survey, Taxonomy, and Open Research Challenges

Financial Technology (FinTech) has attracted a wide range of attention and is rapidly proliferating. As a result of its consistent growth new terms have been introduced in this domain. The term `FinTech' is one such terminology. This term is used for describing various operations that are being frequently employed in the financial technology sector. These operations are usually practiced in enterprises or organizations and provide requested services by using Information Technology based applications. The term does take into account various other sensitive issues, like, security, privacy, threats, cyber-attacks, etc. This is important to note that the development of FinTech is indebted to the mutual integration of different state of the art technologies, for example, technologies related to a mobile embedded system, mobile networks, mobile cloud computing, big data, data analytics techniques, and cloud computing etc. However, this technology is facing several security and privacy issues that are much needed to be addressed in order to improve the acceptability of this new technology among its users. In an effort to secure FinTech, this article provides a comprehensive survey of FinTech by reviewing the most recent as well as anticipated financial industry privacy and security issues. It provides a comprehensive analysis of current security issues, detection mechanisms and security solutions proposed for FinTech. Finally, it discusses future challenges to ensure the security and privacy of financial technology applications.