The Buzz

The $1 billion Cogent Bank recently integrated blockchain-based, real-time payment platform TassatPay to provide its business-to-business (B2B) clients with 24/7 instant payment options.

Cybersecurity measures are a priority at Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), from monitoring and mitigation to solution investment. Banks rarely consider cybersecurity a finished process; the nimbleness of fraudsters and quick development of new hacking technology spur perpetually evolving security measures for risk and anti-money laundering (AML) divisions at most large financial institutions. But keepin...

Synthetic identities are increasingly used to attack buy now, pay later (BNPL) offerings, says Mike Cook, vice president of fraud solutions commercialization at identity verification firm Socure.   “Synthetic identities take a different bunch of different forms, but basically, they're just identities that don't really exist,” Cook tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. “...

Customer service systems often automate call recording and processing analysis, but you can tell a lot by detecting just the tone of a conversation.    Los Angeles-based Behavioral Signals says its technology is more effective than humans at determining empathy and intention. Rather than attempting to detect the actual words being said and how they’re used, there is the “acoustic” content of a con...

Use cases for intelligent document processing (IDP) include automating the know your customer (KYC) process.  The KYC process previously was performed by humans, which led to plenty of effort and errors, says Sateesh Seetharamiah, director at artificial intelligence and automation company EdgeVerve. Using IDP, one “very large U.S. financial bank” is now able to process 20 million documents through...

Two trends emerging as opportunities for banking-as-a-service (BaaS) are the growth of the gig economy and small businesses, and Green Dot, the fintech and holding company that powers services for Uber , Walmart , Amazon Flex and Intuit, is getting in on the action.   Green Dot is currently focusing on those BaaS opportunities, Amit Parikh, executive vice president of BaaS at Green Dot, tells Bank...

Daylight Automation co-founder explains the challenges  Commercial banks are focusing on a human-centric approach to relationships that may be holding them back when it comes to digitizing such basic functions as account opening.  This more human approach is a challenge, Art Harrison, co-founder and chief growth officer for workflow automation vendor Daylight Automation, tells Bank Automation News...

The years of anticipation surrounding the development and adoption of Federal Reserve instant payment service FedNow is a case of much ado about nothing at the bank level.   Although industry experts have wondered what the upcoming adoption of FedNow will look like at financial institutions — especially community banks and credit unions —the onus will be on core providers to adapt and provide, Vin...

Microsoft plans to expand its Cloud for Financial Services offering beyond the U.S. and Canada to Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.  Beyond geography, the expansion also includes updated language and functionality, Bill Borden, corporate vice president of worldwide financial services at Microsoft, says in today’s episode of “The Buzz”...

As crypto continues to gain traction with banks and financial institutions, experts are cautioning against moving away from its traditional use cases. Banks as diverse as $1.6 trillion Goldman Sachs and $122 billion Signature Bank have dipped their toes into the cryptocurrency pool, with Goldman Sachs originating its first Bitcoin-backed loan in April and Signature Bank holding $29 billion in cryp...

Before inking deals with the nation’s biggest banks and financial institutions, fintech Akoya was focused on secure open finance.   The Boston-based fintech, which originated as an application programming interface (API) division under Fidelity Investments, is now owned by several banks, including the $3.24 trillion Bank of America, $2.3 trillion Citi and $1.95 trillion Wells Fargo. The fintech ta...

When a doctor’s office switched to virtual office visits during the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses were given iPads and sent into private rooms to connect with patients over Zoom, then waited for the doctor to make his rounds to each iPad.  While this example of an effort at digitization appears quaint, it exemplifies the perils of digitizing manual processes, says Jeff Keltner, senior vice president o...

Quantum computing has implications for high-value challenges in finance, according to an industry expert.  Quantum computing can be used to measure credit decay, increase training speed for machine learning algorithms, including accelerating Monte Carlo calculations, and to optimize portfolios, explains Sam Mugel, who holds a Ph. D. in quantum computing, in this episode of Bank Automation News ’ p...

PenFed owes its multibillion-dollar growth in total and origination assets to a sweeping automation overhaul.   The McLean, Va.-based credit union has automated much of its front- and back-end business processes, including origination platforms, decisioning and modelling capabilities, and credit-processing functions. And these technology overhauls were not just for show.   Automation helped the cr...

In this episode of "The Buzz" podcast, Bank Automation News hears from Seke Ballard, founder and CEO of Beta Financial Services , a Chicago-based holding company that has applied for a bank charter with FDIC and the state of Illinois. The resulting branchless digital bank, BetaBank , will offer basic products and services such as checking and savings accounts with a focus on automating its commerc...

Sixty-three percent of respondents to a recent survey think resetting their password is a huge inconvenience and 14% would rather be stuck in rush-hour traffic than reset their password.   And ironically, at one institution, fraudsters were able to pass knowledge-based question barriers 92% of the time, while actual customers correctly answered the questions only about 48% of the time, according t...

The level of security and service that cloud infrastructures provide makes it an inevitable technology for banks and financial institutions.   Questions around operational control and security capacity dominated the cloud conversation prior to the pandemic, but the ensuing upheaval caused many banks to reexamine their processes, Narendra Mistry, chief product officer, international digital banking...

Heang Chan, co-founder and CEO of low-code solutions provider Prelim, knows firsthand how manual and cumbersome customer-facing processes can be. It’s one reason he left banking seven years ago to work in fintechs.   “I spent a considerable amount of time as a banker and realized that there were a lot of, I would say, places where we can improve the customer experience,” Chan tells Bank Automation...

Skyrocketing scams and card-not-present (CNP) fraud losses can be blamed on bad actors leveraging automation, experts say. Consumer scams reported by bank executives have risen by double-digit percentages since the start of the pandemic, while CNP fraud losses look poised to reach $9.2 billion in 2023, a 15% year-over-year increase, according to research firm Aite-Novarica. While the scale of thes...

Migrating legacy apps to the cloud is as complex as ‘a heart transplant’   Banks undoubtedly face challenges when transitioning to the cloud, including monolithic applications, a lack of resources, and legacy processes and workflows.  Many also lack a clearly defined strategy shaped by business objectives, says Chinmoy Banerjee, corporate vice president and global head of banking at consulting fir...

Tech and regulatory hurdles stand in the way of a fully interoperable payments environment in the U.S.   Consumers increasingly expect an interoperable — seamless and friction-free — payments ecosystem, with several banks and fintechs leading the charge through embedded data sharing and real-time payments (RTP). However, the growth in payments digitization has left many financial institutions and...

Sixty-two percent of banks say the complexity and risks associated with handling personal data for artificial intelligence (AI) often outweigh the benefits to customer experience.  That’s according to The Economist Intelligence Unit survey sponsored by core provider Temenos. While data can be a challenge, there are three steps organizations can take to better manage that data, Sue Laws, executive...

Computer vision is a form of artificial intelligence that can help manage data, explains Tackle AI co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Sergio Suarez Jr., in this episode of “The Buzz” Podcast.  Currently, the financial services industry’s use case for the technology is in mortgages, where banks are utilizing it to assess risk. Computer vision can sort through pages of documentation to pull out...

TD Bank’s U.S. strategy for commercial payments leans on back-office process automation.   While the $450 billion U.S. arm of the Toronto-based bank has been digitizing its payments capabilities for several years, the pandemic accelerated the process for TD customers who may have been reticent to invest in automation.  The bank’s commercial customers realized that existing “paper-pushing,” manual...

Banks must shift their talent strategy from retention to productivity as the financial services industry struggles to keep up with demand for technology-focused employees.   Training and retaining tech talent will be key for banks in 2022, with 54% of respondents of one survey listing staffing and retention as pressing needs, according to customer engagement firm Engageware. Banks should look to i...