Trust assessment of account information services providers in Portugal : Banks, Bigtechs, and Fintechs

Account Information Services (AIS) enable users to consolidate all of their payment accounts information in a single platform. Banks, Bigtechs, and Fintechs are the main candidates to compete in the AIS market. Banks argue that consumers’ trust puts them in a favourable position to dominate this market. However, since the recent global financial crisis the level of trust in banks is considered debatable. The main purpose of this research is to conclude if banks are right to hold consumers’ trust as a positive differentiator from other providers. After a careful assessment of the elements determinant to the levels of trust in financial services, the usage of a primary data source allowed this research to compare different scores between institutions, not only regarding overall trust, but also in each determinant. Furthermore, this study measured the strength of the correlations between determinants and the overall institutional scores, as well as between individual’s trust in the financial system and in each institution. The results showed that there is no apparent sign that banks are about to be overthrown as AIS market leaders due to the levels of trust in financial services providers. However, individuals’ strong association of banks with the system, along with the highest score of Bigtechs in several determinants, and Fintechs opportunity from their image’s disconnection with the system, can make the outlook change in the near future.Os Serviços de Informação sobre Contas (AIS) que permitem aos usuários consolidar todas as suas informações de contas de pagamento agregadas numa plataforma. Bancos, Bigtechs e Fintechs são os principais candidatos a competir no mercado de AIS. Os bancos argumentam que a confiança dos consumidores os coloca numa posição favorável para dominar este mercado. No entanto, desde a crise financeira global, o nível de confiança nos bancos é discutível. O principal objetivo desta investigação é concluir se os bancos estão certos ao julgar a confiança dos consumidores como um fator positivo de diferenciação em relação às outras instituições. A utilização de uma fonte primária de dados permitiu que esta pesquisa comparasse diferentes pontuações entre instituições, não apenas no que se refere à confiança geral, mas também em cada determinante. Além disso, este estudo mediu a força das correlações entre os determinantes e as pontuações institucionais gerais, bem como entre a confiança do indivíduo no sistema financeiro e em cada instituição. Os resultados mostraram que não há indícios aparentes de que os bancos estejam prestes a ser derrubados como líderes do mercado AIS em Portugal devido aos níveis de confiança nos prestadores de serviços financeiros. No entanto, a forte associação dos bancos com o sistema por parte dos indivíduos, junto com a pontuação mais alta das Bigtechs em vários determinantes, e a oportunidade das Fintechs de sua desconexão de imagem com o sistema, podem fazer a mudança o paradigma em um futuro próximo

Role-based Access Management for Ad-hoc Collaborative Sharing

Under scientific collaborations, resource sharing tends to be highly dynamic and often ad hoc. The dynamic characteristics and sharing patterns of ad-hoc collaborative sharing impose a need for comprehensive and flexible approaches to reflect and cope with the unique access control requirements associated with the ad-hoc collaboration. In this paper, we propose a role-based access management framework to enable secure resource sharing, especially focusing on the digital information sharing in the heterogeneous scientific collaboration environments. Our framework incorporates role-based approach to address distributed access control, delegation and dissemination control involved in the resource sharing within such environments. A set of XACML-based policy schemas is proposed to specify policies on our framework. To demonstrate the feasibility of our framework, we design and implement a proof-of-concept prototype system called ShareEnabler, which is based on a peer-to-peer information sharing toolki