The value of data is often greater than the sum of its parts. In the financial services sector specifically, the use of data allows financial institutions to offer greater value and personalised services to clients and address business challenges such as fraud. However, the use of data raises privacy and security concerns from customers, institutions and regulators—these competing obligations have historically prevented institutions from unlocking the full value of their data. Now, emerging privacy enhancing techniques (PETs) have the potential to fundamentally alter these dynamics by reducing or eliminating the privacy risks of sharing data and opening the opportunities to create value.

The World Economic Forum (Forum) and Deloitte Global’s latest report discusses five PETs that allow institutions, customers, and regulators to analyse and share insights from data without distributing the underlying data itself. These techniques are:

• Differential privacy, where noise is added to an analytical system so that it is impossible to reverse-engineer the individual inputs
• Federated analysis, where parties share the insights from their analysis without sharing the data itself
• Homomorphic encryption, where data is encrypted before it is shared, such that it can still be analysed but not decoded into the original information
• Zero-knowledge proofs, where users can prove their knowledge of a value without revealing the value itself
• Secure multiparty computation, where data analysis is spread across multiple parties such that no individual party can see the complete set of inputs

The report outlines how each technique works at a high level and illustrates, through hypothetical use cases, how PETs can enhance privacy in financial services. Ultimately, the report makes the case that PETs can redefine the dynamics of data-sharing, allowing institutions to create value while addressing their most pressing problems in a way that is acceptable to customers, regulators and society at large.

Read the full report to determine how PETs can help you unlock the full potential of your organisational data while protecting it.

Read Deloitte’s executive summary to assimilate the key highlights from the Forum report.