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How DeFi is building new financial systems and how that could impact and benefit traditional finance in the future

By Adam Greenberg, co-founder of Nova Finance

More and more of us have taken the plunge investing into assets, particularly during the pandemic. According to a study by Schwab, 15% of all US stock market participants in 2020 were first time investors. This was a booming time for asset investment and it was very hard to not make a return. The S&P500 index rose over 100% across 2 years when the pandemic hit in March 2020.

However, times have changed and the after effects of the pandemic are starting to emerge. In a world where inflation and supply chain issues are rampant, rate hikes are at the top of the federal reserve agenda and the majority of assets have declined at least 20% in value in the last few months, it became even tougher to stay on top of your assets and investments.

Many people are starting to face the reality that most of the recent rises of the last few years were not due to any kind of ability or skill. What was a financial bubble has come to an end and there is a realisation of the importance of needing thorough knowledge of financial markets and the value of effective investment and risk management systems to be a successful investor in the long term. 

If you don’t know what you are looking for, it can be tough to even conceptualise the raw ingredients for success required. Something as fundamental at looking at a price and volume chart might not be considered or known as a possibility. This is a genuine limitation that some new investors experience, yet seems almost unfathomable to someone of even intermediate experience in investing.

Across asset classes such as stocks, commodities, cash and government bonds, multiple parties are required to maintain the acquisition, transferring, security and maintenance of these assets.

It’s not exactly painful and frustrating for us as investors and users of these asset classes, the internet has greatly reduced the time and physical actions that us and those behind the scenes need to carry out. But it’s also not truly efficient either.

The cost of compliance report in 2018 suggests that around $270bn is spent by financial institutions on compliance and regulation. While it’s very important that this area is well resourced for the sake of the global economy, it’s hard to resist the feeling that this could all be streamlined and greatly improved.

To many of these challenges described above, I believe that blockchain technology and the applications and industries built on top of it such as decentralized finance (DeFi) have huge potential for the future.

Blockchains have already moved from the initial “read only” mentality that bitcoin was originally created with. Execution layers exist through smart contracts – basically programs that live directly on the blockchain. As the blockchain is decentralized and trustless, its immutability means that these programs are virtually guaranteed to execute exactly as written.

Naturally the challenge with smart contracts is building robust instructions and we’ve seen some infamous loopholes discovered throughout the years. However, the industry is starting to smarten up and the rate of brand-new exploits has been declining over the 12-18 months with the majority of exploits in 2021/2022 being repeats only possible due to poor security management.

Already on the blockchain, there exists powerful financial functions such as lending, credit instruments, instant conversions of assets and hedging tools like options. We call programs of this nature part of “Decentralized Finance” because of the fact they live on the blockchain and are accessible to anyone. Many of these functions can be found and accessed in under 10 clicks – but only if you know where to look. 

Decentralized Finance has the potential to bring access to a diverse range of assets and high-quality tools for users. For organisations, there lies an opportunity to bring efficient systems and act as a common layer between the traditional and new.

The fundamental properties of the blockchain provide an interesting proposition as a primary ledger for all kinds of asset management. Additionally, Non-custodianship by assigning ownership through private keys and regulating via smart contracts is possible and could remove many of the risks that organisations must fight and maintain when acting as custodians.

Furthermore, interoperability between the old, new and alternative is more valuable than ever. Onboarding traditional assets to blockchain infrastructure would allow many of the frictionless qualities of crypto assets such as speed and worldwide access to be harnessed. It’s worth mentioning that progression in this area is dependent on how well traditional legal frameworks can be adapted to accommodate the nuances of blockchain technology. Many jurisdictions don’t yet officially acknowledge blockchains as an acceptable place to use as a source of truth and records.

On the user side, investing is often a pretty solitary thing in most parts of the world. Communities and collective investing are an interesting opportunity to help individuals build knowledge, make better decisions and build up experience. Social trading has produced some interesting models such as copy-trading but there’s yet to be a solution that gets the balance between reducing exposure of participants to the whims of an individual and aligning and incentivising all parties well enough to help the greater good of the collective.

Speaking of alignment and incentive, DeFi has the potential to make automation and complex algorithms available to the masses through its global reach and scalable deployment through smart contracts. Automation can be powerful in removing some of the barriers that less experienced participants face such as limited time, knowledge gaps and emotional trading. Unfortunately, there’s yet to be a simple and proven monetisation/distribution model for algorithms to the masses and this results in owners of great algorithms having no incentive to even the playing field.

To sum up these benefits, hard coding in regulation and instructions via smart contracts could save massively on compliance costs for organisations. 

For users, DeFi has the potential to become the “go to” for all kinds of asset management, allowing them access to resources that would better prepare them and high-quality tools that have the potential to reduce downside risk and optimise returns further.

There is arguably no better time for traditional finance to embrace blockchain technology and decentralized finance. Some of the scaling issues that have been regarded as a setback for blockchain are starting to disappear: Ethereum gas is at its lowest prices since the pandemic began and alternative platforms like Solana are starting to find their form in consistently delivering instant transactions at very low cost. 

DeFi has begun to produce stable and reliable processes that have proved their value and demand. Powerful new business models have emerged that rebalance power and give value back to stakeholders at every level. The first 5m users in DeFi have already been onboarded, now it’s about making it easier to onboard the next 500m users. 

Equally, it would be unwise to underestimate the value that traditional finance provides. Without the foundations it once pioneered, decentralized finance would be near impossible to conceive and many of the lessons learned in traditional finance throughout the years would be yet uncovered.

Adding stability into the innovation and adding innovation to the stable will give us the best possible foundation for the future and for even further progression to emerge.

 

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Business

‘Tis the Season to be Wary: How to Protect Your Business from Holiday Season Hacking

The holiday season will soon be in full swing, but cybercriminals aren’t known for their holiday spirit. While consumers have traditionally been the prime targets for cybercriminals during the holiday season – lost in a frenzy of last-minute online shopping and unrelenting ads – companies are increasingly falling victim to calculated cyber attacks.

Against this backdrop of relaxed vigilance and festive distractions, cybercriminals are set to deploy everything from ransomware to phishing scams, all designed to capitalise on the holiday haze. Businesses that fail to prioritise their cybersecurity could end up embracing not so much “tidings of comfort and joy” as unwanted data breaches and service outages well into 2024.

Threat Landscape

With the usual winter disruptions about to kick into overdrive, opportunistic hackers are aiming to exploit organisational turmoil this holiday season. Industry research consistently indicates a substantial spike in cyber attacks targeting businesses during holidays, particularly when coupled with the following factors:

  • Employee Burnout: Employee burnout is rife around the holidays. Trying to complete major projects or hit targets before the end of the year can require long hours and intense workweeks. Overwrought schedules combined with the seasonal stressors of Christmas shopping, family politics, travel expenses, hosting duties etc., can lead to a less effective and exhausted workforce.
  • Vacation Days: The holiday season is a popular time for employees to use up their vacation days and paid time off. This means offices are often emptier than usual during late December and early January. With fewer people working on-site, critical security tasks are neglected and gaps in security widen.
  • Network Strain: The holidays also mark a period of network strain due to increased traffic and network requests. Staff shortages also reduce organisational response capacity if systems are compromised. The result is company networks that are understaffed and overwhelmed.

Seasonal Cyber Attacks

There are many ways bad actors look to exploit system vulnerabilities and human errors to breach defences this time of year. But rather than relying solely on sophisticated hacking techniques, most holiday-fueled cyber attacks succeed through tried and true threat vectors:

  • Holiday-Themed Phishing and Smishing Campaigns: Emails and texts impersonating parcel carriers with tracking notifications contain fraudulent links, deploying malware or capturing account credentials once clicked by unwitting recipients trying to track deliveries. A momentary slip-up is all it takes to unleash malware payloads granting complete network access.
  • Fake Charity Schemes: Malicious links masquerading as holiday philanthropy efforts compromise business accounts when donated to.
  • Remote Access Exploits: External connectivity to internal networks comes with the territory of the season. However, poorly configured cloud apps and public Wi-Fi access points create openings for criminals to intercept company data from inadequately protected employee devices off-site.
  • Ransomware Presents: Empty offices combined with delayed threat detection gives innovative extortion malware time to wrap itself around entire company systems and customer data before unveiling a not so jolly ransom note on Christmas morning.

Without proper precautions, the impact from misdirected clicks or downloads can quickly spiral across business servers over the holidays, leading to widespread data breaches and stolen customer credentials.

Essential Steps to Safeguard Systems

While eliminating all risks remains unlikely and tight budgets preclude launching entirely new security initiatives this holiday season, businesses can deter threats and address seasonal shortcomings through several key actions:

Prioritise Core Software Updates

Hardening network infrastructure is the first line of defence this holiday season. With many software products reaching end-of-life in December, it is critical to upgrade network architectures and prioritise core software updates to eliminate known vulnerabilities. Segmenting internal networks and proactively patching software can cut off preferred access routes for bad actors, confining potential breaches when hacking attacks surge.

Cultivate a Culture of Cybersecurity Awareness

Cybersecurity awareness training makes employees more resilient to rising social engineering campaigns and phishing links that increase during the holidays. Refreshing employees on spotting suspicious emails can thwart emerging hacking techniques. With more distractions and time out of the office this season, vigilance is more important than ever! Train your staff to “never” directly click a link from an email or text.  Even if they are expecting a delivery they should still go directly to the known trusted source.

Manage Remote Access Proactively

Criminals aggressively pursue any vulnerabilities exposed during the holiday period to intercept financial and customer data while defences lie dormant. Therefore, businesses should properly configure cloud apps and remote networks before the holiday season hits. This will minimise pathways for data compromise when employees eventually disconnect devices from company systems over the holidays.

Mandate Multifactor Authentication (MFA)

Most successful attacks stem from compromised user credentials. By universally mandating MFA across all access points this season, retailers add critical layers of identity verification to secure systems. With MFA fatigue setting in over holidays, have backup verification methods ready to deter credential stuffing.

Prepare to Respond, Not Just Prevent

Despite precautions, holiday disasters can and do occur. Businesses need response plans for periods of disruption and reduced capacity. Have emergency communications prepared for customers and partners in case an attack disrupts operations. The time to prepare is before vacation schedules complicate incident response. It’s important to know how and when to bring in the right expertise if a crisis emerges.

By following best practices to prevent cybersecurity standards slipping before peak winter months, companies can enjoy the holidays without becoming victims of calculated cyber attacks. With swift and decisive action there is still time for businesses to prepare defences against holiday season hacks.

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Business

Transforming unified comms to future-proof your business

By Jonathan Wright, Director of Products and Operations at GCX

Telephony is not usually the first thing SMBs think about when it comes to their digital transformation. However, push and pull factors are bringing it up the priority list and leading them to rethink their approach.

Indeed, it is just one year until PSTN (the copper-based telephone network) will be switched off by BT Openreach. With a recent survey showing that as many as 88% of UK businesses rely on PSTN, many organisations’ hands are being forced to review their communications ahead of the deadline.

But even if this change for some is being forced upon them, the benefits of building a more future-proofed unified communications strategy far outweigh the associated challenges. Nearly three-quarters of employees in UK SMEs now work partly or fully remotely, indeed the highest percentage of any G7 country. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone systems are much better suited to distributed workforces as the phone line is assigned on a user basis, rather than to a fixed location.

And with more companies now integrating AI capabilities to augment their products and services – like Microsoft Teams Pro which leverages OpenAI for improved transcription, automated notes generation and recommended actions – the productivity-boosting benefits for users are only improving.

Making the right choice

For those companies that are seizing the opportunity to change their unified comms in 2024, what should they consider when making their decision?

  1. Choose platforms that will boost user adoption – User adoption will make or break the rollout of a new IT project. So due consideration should be given to what products or services will have the path of least resistance with employees. Choosing a service or graphical user interface (GUI) users are already used to, like Zoom or MS Teams, is likely to result in a higher adoption rate than a net new service.
  1. Embrace innovation with AI capabilities – While some of the services leveraging AI and Large Language Model (LLM) to enhance their capabilities are more expensive than traditional VoIP, the productivity gains could offer an attractive return on investment for many small businesses. Claiming back the time spent typing up meeting notes, or improving the response time to customer calls with automatically-generated actions, will both have tangible benefits to the business. That said, companies should consider what level of service makes sense to their business; they may not need the version with all the bells and whistles to make significant efficiency gains.
  1. Bring multiple services under a single platform – The proliferation of IT tools is becoming an increasing challenge in many businesses; it creates silos that hamper collaboration, leaves employees feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of communications channels to manage, and leads to mounting costs on the business. Expanding the use of existing platforms, or retiring multiple solutions by bringing their features together in one new platform, benefits the business and user experience alike.
  1. Automate onboarding to reduce the burden on IT – Any changes to unified comms should aim to benefit all of the different stakeholders – and that includes the IT team tasked with implementing and managing it. Choosing platforms which support automated onboarding and activation, for example, will reduce the burden on IT when provisioning new tenants, as well as with the ongoing policy management. What’s more, it reduces the risk of human error when configuring the setup to improve the overall security. Or, in the case of Microsoft Teams, even negates the need for Microsoft PowerShell.
  1. Consider where you work – Employees are not only working between home and the office more. Since the pandemic, more people are embracing the digital nomad lifestyle, while others are embracing the opportunity to work more closely with clients on-site or at their offices. This should be considered in unified comms planning as those companies with employees working outside the UK will need to choose a geo-agnostic service.
  1. Stay secure – Don’t let security and data protection be an afterthought. Opt for platforms leveraging authentication protocols, strong encryption, and security measures to safeguard sensitive information and support compliance.

Making the right switch

As many small businesses start planning for changes in their telephony in 2024 as the PSTN switch-off approaches, it is important that take the time to explore how the particular requirements of their organisations and how the changes to their communications could better support their new working practices and boost productivity.

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Business

Will your network let down your AI strategy? 

Rob Quickenden, CTO at Cisilion

As companies start to evaluate how they can use AI effectively, there is a clear need to ensure your network is up to the challenges of AI first. AI applications are going to require your data to be easily accessible and your network will need to be able to handle the huge compute needs of these new applications. It will also need to be secure enough at all points of access for the different applications to end users’ different devices. If your network isn’t reliable, readily available and secure it is likely going to fail.  

In Cisco’s 2023 Networking Report 41% of networking professional across 2,500 global companies said that providing secure access to applications distributed across multiple cloud platforms is their key challenge, followed by gaining end-to-end visibility into network performance and security (37%). 

So, what can you do to make your network AI ready? 

First, you need to see AI as part of your digital transformation, then you need to look at where you need it and where you don’t. Jumping on the bandwagon and implementing AI for the sake of it isn’t the way forward. You need to have a clear strategy in place about where and how you are going to use AI. Setting up an AI taskforce to look at all aspects of your AI strategy is a good first step. They need to be able to identify how AI can help transform your business processes and free up time to focus on your core business. At the same time, they need to make sure your infrastructure can handle your AI needs.  

Enterprise networks and IT landscapes are growing more intricate every day. The demand for seamless connectivity has skyrocketed as businesses expand their digital footprint and hybrid working continues. The rise of cloud services, the Internet of Things (IoT), and data-intensive applications have placed immense pressure on traditional network infrastructures and AI will only increase this burden. AI requires much higher levels of compute power too. The challenge lies in ensuring consistent performance, security, and reliability across a dispersed network environment. 

Use hybrid and multi-cloud to de-silo operations 

According to Gartner’s predictions, by 2025, 51% of IT spending will shift to the cloud. Underscoring the importance of having a robust and adaptable network infrastructure that can seamlessly integrate with cloud services. This is even more important with AI as it needs to access data from different locations and sources across your business to be successful. For example, AI often requires data from different sources to train models and make predictions. A company that wants to develop an AI system to predict customer churn may need to access data from multiple sources such as customer demographics, purchase history and social media activity.  

IT teams need to make sure that they are using hybrid cloud and multi-cloud to de-silo operations to bring together network and security controls and visibility and allow for easy access to data. Where businesses use multiple cloud providers or have some data on-premise, they need to be reviewing how that data will be used and so how to access it across departments.

Install the best security and network monitoring  

It’s clear that as we develop AI for good, there is also a darker side weaponizing AI to create more sophisticated cyber-attacks. Businesses need end-to-end visibility into their network performance and security and to be able to provide secure access to applications distributed across multiple cloud platforms. This means having effective monitoring tools in place and the right layers of security – not only at the end user level but also across your network at all access points.  

Being able to review and test the performance of your SaaS based applications will also be key to the success of your AI solutions. AI requires apps to work harder and faster so tasting their speed, scalability and stability, and ensuring they are up to the job and can perform well under varying workloads is important.  

Secure Access Service Edge 

The best way to ensure your network security is as good as it can be is to simplify your tools and create consistency by using Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). This is an architecture that delivers converged network and security as service capabilities including SD-WAN and cloud native security functions such as secure web gateways, cloud access security brokers, firewall as-a-service, and zero-trust network access.  SASE delivers wide area network and security controls as a cloud computing service directly to the source of connection rather than at the data centre which will protect your network and users more effectively.  

SD-WAN connectivity 

If you haven’t already, extending your SD-WAN connectivity consistently across multiple clouds to automate cloud-agnostic connectivity and optimise the application experience is a must. It will enable your organisation to securely connect users, applications and data across multiple locations while providing improved performance, reliability and scalability. SD-WAN also simplifies the management of WANs by providing centralised control and visibility over the entire network. 

As we head towards the new era of AI, cloud is the new data centre, Internet is the new network, and cloud offerings will dominate applications. By making sure your network is AI ready, by adopting a cloud-centric operating model, having a view of global Internet health and the performance of top SaaS applications, IT teams will be able to implement their company’s AI strategy successfully. 

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