The Buzz

Ransomware attacks are on the rise across all industries, with financial institutions being a favored target given the customer information and access to cash. But there are steps every bank can take to ward off this type of cyber risk — as well as phishing and DDoS threats — says Barbara Kissner, chief information security officer at Tassat, a global provider of financial technologies and product...

In a strategic partnership to support technical innovation in the banking and financial services sectors, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering recently announced an agreement to collaborate on artificial intelligence, risk management, quantitative research and cybersecurity at the FDIC and U.S. banks. In this episode of “The Buzz” podca...

Armed Forces Bank serves a young, highly decentralized, tech-savvy customer base, and must be available 24/7. Automation and digitalization underly the $1.2 billion bank’s ability to deliver on that mission.  For this podcast, Bank Automation News sat down with Chief Operating Officer Tom Kientz and the Director of Military Consumer Lending Jodi Vickery to better understand the role automation pla...

Banks often struggle with how to automate operations or functions deemed essential or strategically different, says Hemal Nagarsheth, associate partner at global management consultancy Kearney, in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. The Covid-19 pandemic uncovered operational inefficiencies at many financial institutions and in turn compelled the organizations to embrace automation initiatives mor...

This week, the Bank Automation News team discusses how identity decisioning platform provider Alloy is using artificial intelligence to attract Generation Z customers. Gen Z, born after 1997, can present a challenge to banks because they generally lack traditional credit and banking services.  The BAN team also drilled down on the security risks posed by APIs, which are commonly used to connect ba...

Banks are increasing their use of artificial intelligence-enabled automation, focusing on how to identify and verify customers for onboarding, and AI-powered solutions appear critical to gaining Generation Z customers, says Charley Ma, general manager of fintech at identity decisioning platform provider Alloy, in today’s episode of “The Buzz.” Gen Z refers to young people born after 1997.    Banks...

Bank of America's artificial intelligence powered virtual assistant has graduated from handling customer inquiries to helping financial advisors at Merrill Lynch. While Goldman Sachs eyes a transaction banking expansion into Japan, JPMorgan is hoping digital rails help it play the disruptor role in markets like the U.K. and Brazil.

Community development financial institutions (CDFIs) and minority depository institutions (MDIs) serve as major sources of consumer and commercial loans for low-income individuals and minority groups; however, a lack of automation continues to plague some of these financial institutions and hinder the delivery of loans.   CDFIs deliver at least 60% of their total lending, services and other activi...

This week, the Bank Automation News team discusses the July 9 announcement from the White House regarding stepped-up regulatory efforts to promote competition and enforce antitrust action primarily in the Big Tech and health care sectors. The executive order also calls for banks to allow customers to take their own financial transaction data with them to competitor banks. In this week's podcast, B...

This week, Bank Automation News discusses comments made by U.S. Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Randal Quarles’ to the Utah Bankers Association Convention this week, in which he compared central bank digital currency (CBDC) to the ill-conceived parachute pants of the 1980s.   The BAN team also delve into recent public responses to a federal request for information on artificial intellig...

Blend plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol BLND and while legal definitions of fairness might be clear, mathematical aspects are still in flux and that could affect AI-driven lending.

Janine Hiller of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University on defining fairness in AI-powered credit and how a regulatory approach which combines social and technical expertise may be the way to go for AI governance.

In this podcast, Hawk AI founder and CEO Tobias Schweiger discusses the use of machine learning to eliminate false positives created by AML rules-based engines while stressing that new technologies should be seen as a supplement — not a replacement — for rules-based detection. 

This week, Bank Automation News delves into a House committee’s inquiry into a potential central bank digital currency (CBDC), and explored China’s role in prompting the U.S. to explore a CBDC, as well as the U.S. hesitancy to adopt digital currency. The BAN team also explored how neobanks are causing more banks to abandon a major financial institution money maker — overdraft fees . Find a discuss...

Removing bias from artificial intelligence (AI) models may seem as simple as removing demographic information from the data, but it may be more valuable instead to inform the model about the demographics, then weight them to offset bias.  That’s one possibility studies have supported, Stephen Thomas tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz.” Thomas is the head of the Analytics and A...

Bank Automation News goes over the Biden administration’s establishment of an artificial intelligence task force and software firm Citrix's shift to an API-driven treasury management system.

In this week’s podcast, Bank Automation News tackles the question of what banks can expect from regulatory agencies when it comes to deploying artificial intelligence (AI) in financial services. AI may offer a competitive advantage for U.S. companies, Sultan Meghji, the FDIC’s new chief innovation officer, told BAN . And while he said AI should be tested for bias, he stated that “the vast majority...

With all the ships at sea at any given time, banks involved in maritime trade transactions find it especially time consuming to pore over shipping logs and confirm whether vessels carrying goods are on a sanction list. Bank Automation News spoke with Ami Daniels, chief executive at Windward, a maritime intelligence company that builds artificial intelligence (AI) models to help banks automate due...

Bank Automation News spoke with KeyBank on how the Ohio-based financial institution is leveraging robotic process automation (RPA) tools to automate internal processes. Wall street banks took note of their use of automation technology and AI to fight fraud in testimony presented at U.S. Senate hearing and BAN gathered inputs from industry leaders, consultants and practitioners about how financial...

Financial institutions should expect data privacy laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to spread to other states and countries, creating pressure on multinational banks.   In this episode of “The Buzz,” Bank Automation News learns that even banks with customer service based in other countries will be challenged to comply with new regulations, according to Evgeny Likhoded, founder a...

This week, Bank Automation News drilled down on key performance indicators (KPIs) for bots, and process discovery, or the pre-automation analysis of processes.   While it’s common practice to use purely operational KPIs, such as measuring bots deployed, experts say a better practice is to align bot KPIs with business goals. One key step to determining bot success is to engage in process discovery...

In this week’s episode of “The Buzz,” Bank Automation News explores the threat of randsomware attacks on financial institutions . Banks are facing the growing cybersecurity threat that shut down the Colonial Pipeline last week and the BAN team discusses how banks can avoid falling victim to similar attacks by ransomware hackers. In other news, new use cases for robot process automation (RPA) are c...

Commercial banks have been automating aspects of the lending and decisioning process, primarily at the lower end of commercial lending spectrum, but hesitate to automate for loans more than $1 million. 

In this week’s edition of “The Buzz,” Bank Automation News explores data automation and to the extent the to which software can manage data points. One challenge faced by banks in data management is how how to conveniently pull data from multiple sources and pool it so that it can be more effective processing.

IBM sees chatbots handling 80% of calls: Chatbots are evolving to be more useful for customers and employees. “You are going to start to progressively see chatbots being able to assist, even on things that are a little bit more complicated,” says Likhit Wagle, IBM’s general manager for global banking and financial markets, in this podcast.