Banking on Cryptography

In the 21st Century, banks have, through injudicious actions, seriously damaged their image for Trustworthiness with their customers.This paper discusses how modern cryptography may be employed to help restore trust in banking, at the same time making banking more secure, private and reliable.Efficient tools and techniques already exist to make the transition to a most trustworthy banking system using cryptography, but it will require taking a big-picture perspective of the problem. At the moment, individual banks and regulators are dipping their toes into the complex word of cryptography but that is only resulting in a series of disjointed, piecemeal solutions that, in the end, will, at best, only solve part of the problem and, after much expenditure. will have eventually to be rebuilt to more reliable standards.Cryptography is not a ‘silver bullet’ to the problem of re-establishing trust across the financial system but will be a key tool in helping customers to regain trust in the banking system. The paper first discusses the issue of Trust, in particular the changes in technology and organizations that have eroded citizen’s trust in their banks. The ‘friendly’ bank, familiar to all in the 20th Century is disappearing fast.After providing a necessarily brief history of Cryptography, focusing on Modern Cryptography, the paper proposes a high-level architecture for embedding Cryptography into modern banking, always recognizing the difficulties that changing any part of the global banking system will entail