Esquire Bank considers client needs when determining where to invest in products and innovation. The New York-based bank, which provides small businesses lending and litigation finance, is working on customized lending for its litigation platform that is expected to roll out early next year, Chief Executive Andrew Sagliocca tells Bank Automation News on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  “The best thing we can do in either vertical we serve nationally is to make sure we shut our mouth and listen to what the client not only has to say, but more importantly, let them describe their business, ... their pain points and what their frustrations are,” he says. When lending to niche markets, traditional tech providers often don’t have the products necessary out of the box to serve those clients; that’s where significant customization of technology comes into play, he says.  To offer customized tools to clients, the bank keeps two to three projects in its innovation pipeline with 20 to 30 programmers at a time, he said. Listen as Sagliocca discusses Esquire’s approach to serving underserved markets  tapping tech-driven solutions and quality data.  

J.P. Morgan is joining French payments network Cartes Bancaires, Mike Lozanoff, managing director and global head of merchant services at J.P. Morgan, tells Bank Automation News on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. The bank is tapping cloud-based Renovite to build the connection to the network, Lozanoff says. The bank acquired Renovite in 2022 and is using the cloud-based solution and its team to build the tech, he says.  “We’ll be the first American bank actually part of the French banking system, where we’ll be registered and able to offer that card type directly in France,” he says. Cartes Bancaires is “favorable to merchants” as a network as the cost of payment is low, Lozanoff says. The bank plans to have the card offering available by 2025.  Listen as Lozanoff discusses updates to JPM’s merchant acquiring business, including international efforts, e-commerce innovation and in-store offerings.  

Listen as Matt Denham discusses how fintechs can boost digital engagement on FI platforms.  

Listen to ConnectOne’s Sharif Alexandre and Siya Vansia, chief innovation and brand officer at the bank, discuss technology and data strategies. 

Listen as Jess Turner discusses open banking innovation, regulation and the future of open banking for consumers and small businesses. 

Listen as Sanjiv Das discusses POS financing and the opportunity it presents for lenders. 

Listen as Rob Krugman discusses what banks are doing right with AI.  

Listen as Rackspace’s Doony Cross discusses cloud migration, cost management and FinOps. 

Listen as nCino’s Anthony Morris discusses how he helps FIs approach emerging tech. 

Listen as Adam Hallquist, principal at investment firm FTV Capital, discusses fintech funding on “The Buzz” podcast.

Listen to this episode of “The Buzz’ to hear Hapax’s Kevin Green discuss how FIs are streamlining internal operations with AI and replacing time-consuming tasks with the technology. 

Listen as Arteria AI’s Abrar Huq discusses how FIs are using AI to structure their data.

Listen as Arteria AI’s Abrar Huq discusses how FIs are using AI to structure their data and unlock the potential of data they already have.  

Listen to “The Buzz” to hear Chad Wallace discuss Mastercard's API strategy, B2B solutions and virtual card innovations. 

Listen as Temenos’ Rodrigo Silva discusses the future of the cloud in banking, what clients are requesting and how to approach cloud migration. 

Listen to Jane Prokop discuss how Mastercard is creating solutions to help SMBs and how the company aims to use new technologies like AI to drive business growth.

Listen as Grasshopper CEO Mike Butler discusses how the digital bank competes for deposits through customer retention efforts and investment in customer experience.  

Listen as Fintel Connect CEO Nicky Senyard discusses how financial institutions can grow account volume, bring acquisition costs down and gain overall deposits. 

Listen as Citizen's Jo Wyper discusses how to approach generative AI and new innovations the commercial bank is working on for 2024.  

Listen as Jack Henry's Greg Adelson discusses his transition into the role of CEO.  

Listen as Savana COO Emily Steele discusses how banks can use technology to create efficient and consistent processes throughout their operations. 

Listen as Fiserv's Dudley White discusses the digital experiences financial institutions are developing to meet client expectations. 

Listen as Chargebacks911 CEO Monica Eaton shares what tech she is watching in 2024. 

Listen as Episode Six CEO John Mitchell addresses how FIs can best approach modernization, the 2024 tech trends to monitor, and the recent evolution of technology in the financial services industry.

Listen as WorkFusion's Adam Famularo shares how financial institutions can leverage digital workers and AI to drive efficiency within the organization. 

Listen as Zest AI CEO Mike de Vere tells how credit unions are improving the underwriting process with AI. 

Softserve's Rishi Chohan discusses the opportunities that digital wallets present to FIs. 

Listen as UiPath’s Graham Sheldon discusses how financial institutions can improve operations by automating mundane tasks with AI and generative AI.  

Listen as Bottomline Technologies’ Kevin Pettet discusses the “must-have” technologies banks need to support business clients.  

Listen as Trustfull’s Alex Tonello discusses the ways in which fraudsters are using AI — and how FIs can protect their clients. 

 Listen to “the Buzz” as Alkami's Jeff Bucher explains how FIs can best approach integrating FedNow and RTP. 

Listen as Robin Smith explains Praxent’s digital maturity model.

Listen as Shanker Ramamurthy discusses embedded finance, open banking and how FIs can approach new regulation.  

Listen as Mission Lane's Mike Lempner discusses AI uses at the fintech, monitoring risk and maintaining compliance when implementing new technology throughout a financial institution.  

Listen as Sunbit CEO Arad Levertov discusses with “The Buzz” how to navigate a high-rate environment with consumers and technology at the forefront.  

Listen as Seon’s Chief Revenue Officer Matt DeLauro discusses how neobanks can prepare their operations to proactively fight fraud. 

Listen as Broadridge’s Debbie Miglaw discusses how banks can improve the customer experience by leaning on data and insights.  

Listen as Grasshopper’s Chris Tremont discusses the digital bank’s latest solution and its continued effort to support startup banking. 

Listen as Qualtric’s Dmitry Binkevich discusses how FIs can use technology to drive change within their organizations based on applicable customer data. 

Listen as Archway Software's Dustin Hubbard discusses AI use cases, maintaining competitiveness in the space and the future of AI in finance. 

Listen as Kasisto’s Lindsay Soergel discusses intelligent digital assistants, treating AI as a team member and how FIs can bring personality into the technology. 

 Listen as Wisetack’s Bobby Tzekin discusses embedded finance with BAN Editor Whitney McDonald. 

‘The Buzz’ speaks with AML RightSource CTO Phil McLaughlin 

Listen as Solutions by Text CEO Dave Baxter discusses how to integrate text messaging with payments. 

Listen as Uplinq co-founder Ron Benegbi discusses how his experience as an immigrant in Toronto inspired his business, what alternative data can do for SMBs and the collaborative ethos shared by Canadian founders. 

Listen as Defacto co-founder Jordane Giuly discusses the benefits of open banking in Europe, the rise of startup culture in Paris and how French President Emmanuel Macron has made entrepreneurship “cool.” 

Listen as FinMapp Chief Executive Kumar Binit discusses the flourishing startup scene in Bengaluru, India, and explains how the city went from IT hub to the “Silicon Valley of Asia.” 

Listen as Justt’s Chief Risk Officer Roenen Ben-Ami discusses automating chargebacks and his experience as a founder in Tel Aviv, the startup capital of the Middle East and a global leader in cybersecurity innovation. 

Listen to the first installment of the Global Startup Cities podcast from “The Buzz,” as Num Finance’s co-founder Agustin Liserra and Mariano di Pietrantonio discuss their experience founding a fintech in Buenos Aires, a city brimming with innovation, where ever-changing economic conditions make resilience crucial. 

 Listen as Bank of America’s Lindsay Huston discusses AP automation enhancements through AI and ML. 

Listen as Talkdesk's Rahul Kumar discusses how FIs can enhance customer retention through tech investment.   

 Listen as Envestnet D&A President Farouk Ferchichi discusses how financial institutions can harness data to create efficiencies in front- and back-end operations. 

Listen as BlueSnap’s CEO Ralph Dangelmaier discusses payments innovation, lessons learned from collapsed banks and the state of global payments rails today. 

Listen as Coherent Chief Executive John Brisco discusses data model risk and how AI will play a role in risk mitigation at financial institutions.  

Listen as CertifID CEO Tyler Adams discusses the growth of wire fraud through business email compromise and how automation can protect money movement. 

The digital wallet market is saturated and has several established players, but this has not stopped new competitors from entering the space. Despite being one of the late arrivals to the space, Paze, a digital wallet being launched by a consortium of banks, including U.S. Bank, Truist, JPMorgan Chase and PNC, is coming to market in Q3, Peter Galvin, chief growth officer at payments fintech NMI told Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

Listen as Creatio Chief Growth Officer Andie Dovgan discusses how no-code solutions help smaller FIs achieve digitalization to compete with larger institutions.  

Generative AI has beneficial uses for financial institutions, but fraudsters have taken note, employing the technology to create thousands of fake identities. The emergence of generative AI has made rooting out fake users even more challenging for financial institutions (FIs), with cybercriminals harnessing it to deepfake a person’s appearance or replicate their speaking voice, Ajay Amlani, senior vice president and head of the Americas at biometric security company iProov, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  

Bridging the gap between customer experience and digital transformation is critical for financial institutions (FIs) to ensure customers stay engaged.  Providing customers with options on transactions like automatic bill payments are just one way for banks to assure consumers that financial decisions are their own and making certain they are not blindsided, Shane Berry, head of customer experience (CX) at San Francisco-based card issuer Mission Lane, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  

Listen as Finastra’s Al Carpetto discusses the upcoming launch of FedNow and how the financial software provider is preparing its bank and credit union clients for the payments network. 

The fall of Silicon Valley Bank has bank clients looking to financial institutions for deposit security, and banks must have the technology to bring peace of mind to clients. This loss of client trust combined with unnecessarily risky business practices were behind SVB’s failure, Robinson shared in a recent episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

In a world of instant gratification, consumers expect this of payment processes — and technology can help.  Bonita Springs, Fla.-based payments company ConnexPay addresses pain points in the payments world and works to reduce friction, Chief Executive Bob Kaufman tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  

Proper data management is something all financial institutions strive for, but it is not easily achieved due to data siloes and drift.   While the process of organizing and gathering the right data can set banks apart from their competitors, using the right tools to accomplish this is critical, and something all FIs need to address, Jocelyn Houle, senior director of data governance at Securiti.Ai tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

Listen as Sanat Rao, chief executive and head of software-as-a-service provider Infosys Finacle, discusses the evolution of AI and implications of ChatGPT for the financial institutions. 

Listen as Naveed Anwar, global head of TTS digital and data at Citi, discusses Citi’s use of data and customer feedback along with new advancements in data analytics via AI, machine learning and robotic process automation.  

The swift collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has shaken the banking industry during the past two weeks. SVB engaged in risky lending practices and did not have the necessary safeguards in place, leading to a run on deposits that eventually sent the bank into receivership, Mike Sekits, co-founder and managing director of community bank partnership group BTech Consortium, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

Adoption of embedded banking by both businesses and customers is on the rise, and it is helping to reduce the risk of payment fraud along the way. For consumers, tokenizing user credentials for their protection is a benefit; meanwhile, businesses gain security by using integrated systems to accept payments safely, Bennie Pennington, vice president of embedded banking and integrated payments at $190 billion KeyBank, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

Automation has grown at an exponential rate since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the decline of personal interface may leave some bank clients wanting more. Embedded finance can assist by building trust between banks and their customers, Antonio Soares, co-founder and chief executive at Brazilian payments platform Dock, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

 Listen as Dustin Hubbard discusses the launch of Archway Software and his plans for next week’s Bank Automation Summit U.S.

AI fintech Fairplay used ChatGPT to work through an internal software engineering problem. Listen as Fairplay’s Chief Executive Kareem Saleh explains the use case and potential opportunities for financial instututions.

Digital wallet providers are creating customer-centric experiences as more clients desire open banking with control over their finances.  Listen as Curve U.S. CEO Amanda Orson discusses the digital wallet and where regulations stand for open banking in the U.S. compared to Europe. 

Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo are among seven banks teaming to launch a digital wallet in the second half of the year to rival Apple Pay.  As the new digital wallet is rolled out in North America, customer experience should be at the forefront, as use of digital wallets is already high. Forty-three percent of North Americans are using digital wallets, Cecilia Tamez, chief strategy officer at cross-border payment platform Dandelion, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

Listen as James White, industry principal for banking at fintech Total Expert, discusses today’s macroeconomy, the rising rate environment, and how banks can use consumer data and automation to enhance their financial health.

Banks are looking to use AI to improve their financial literacy following Microsoft's $10 billion investment in OpenAI and their ChatGPT technology. ChatGPT technology is “a forerunner and a new class of artificial intelligence that's basically composing written dialogues and could lead to endless possibilities for banks,” Joe Robinson, chief executive, and co-founder at customer relationship management platform Hummingbird, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

The combination of today’s uncertain macroeconomic conditions and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s new open banking rule coming this year has consumers wanting quick access to cash from their banks under the watchful eye of regulators. Listen as Kurt Lin, Pinwheel chief executive, and Raj Date, advisor at Pinwheel and former deputy director of the CFPB, discuss today’s macroeconomy and the importance of secure direct deposit offerings ahead of the CFPB’s new open banking policies.

Synthetic identity fraud remains a constant challenge for banks, with a growing number of fraudsters attacking demand deposit accounts since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, one in three accounts within fintech and retail banking are synthetic, Mike Cook, vice president of commercialization – fraud solutions at identify verification fintech Socure, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

Banks are considering where to invest in 2023 to meet client needs, ranging from digital offerings to customer experience. Understanding the priorities of a vast client base can help large banks like $1.8 trillion Wells Fargo decide which products or services are needed, as well as strategy for the year ahead, Reetika Grewal, executive vice president and head of digital transformation, commercial and corporate and investment bank at Wells Fargo, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

Small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) must navigate several challenges during their first years in business.  Understanding the needs of SMBs is critical, as more than 50% of small businesses fold within the first five years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Listen as Eytan Bensoussan discusses the challenges faced by many SMBs and how they can use data to discover new business opportunities. 

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) plans to propose a new open banking rule in 2023 requiring financial institutions to share consumer data upon consumers’ requests. Along with the new parameters come fresh opportunities for exploitation of data from bad actors — and financial institutions should remain aware of gaps in the rule that fraudsters could take advantage by implementing authentication processes to secure consumer data.

Company treasurers and chief financial officers are worried about access to cash and the risks associated with keeping cash on hand amid drastic changes to the investment market during the past six months that have followed the pandemic, stimulus payments and rising inflation. Listen as Stephane Lintner discusses how corporate finance professionals can access and de-risk their idle cash through automation.

Banks can onboard and meet the evolving needs of business customers when they integrate and use data analytics to tailor the customer experience. Listen as Dean Jenkins, vice president of product marketing at e-banking platform Q2, discusses how understanding what the data reveals about clients in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.

Raleigh, N.C.-based First Citizens Bank is leveraging the services of a fintech to offer search personalization and improve the customer experience. The $108 billion bank has a search bar in the middle of their homepage which allows customers to get direct answers to exactly what they are looking for at the start of a transaction. Listen as Shane Closser, head of industry of financial services at digital experience software provider Yext, discusses how banks can enhance CX through search optimization and how this trend will impact the financial industry in 2023.

Community banks can contend with their larger counterparts by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots to improve both customer experience and internal efficiencies. Listen as Murali Mahalingam, senior vice president of AI business at Eltropy, discusses how community banks can implement and deploy virtual assistants using AI-based technologies in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.

Fintech partnerships allow smaller financial institutions (FIs) to remain competitive in digital banking. Listen as Corserv Chief Executive Jerry Craft discusses how smaller community banks can leverage fintechs in this episode of “The Buzz.”

Banks and fintechs are realizing in today’s volatile economic environment that they need each other to survive, which is spurring innovative partnerships. Listen as Vijay Sondhi, CEO of NMI, discusses the complexities of banks and fintechs partnerships in this episode of "The Buzz."

Banking-as-a-service (BaaS) provider Treasury Prime connects banks and fintechs to improve customer experience and build relationships. Listen as Jeff Nowicki, vice president of banking, at Treasury Prime discusses how the company’s technology is integrated, recent partnerships and why partnering with a BaaS provider delivers high ROI.

Michael Lehmbeck, chief technology officer at BankUnited, gives Bank Automation News a glimpse into what he will share with attendees of next week’s Bank Automation Summit panel discussion.

Artificial intelligence (AI)-based software can streamline the commercial loan process and remove inconsistencies in the traditional approach many financial institutions use today. Listen as Hugh Shannon, head of sales and customer success, at OakNorth discusses how AI can improve the commercial loan process in this episode of “The Buzz.”

Millennials and Gen Z customers are opting for a frictionless banking experience through automation in digital payments, loan approvals and money transfers. Listen as Bryce Deeney discusses how banks and financial institutions can target younger generations by offering digital installment payments and other automated processes.

The role of the chief compliance officer (CCO) at financial institutions has evolved as technology, automation and access to data present new opportunities and challenges for executives. Listen as StarCompliance Chief Executive Jennifer Sun and Chief Technology Officer David Rowland discuss the dynamic role of compliance officers as technology advances at financial institutions.

After a financial institution has successfully digitized its loan origination and account opening system, improving the user experience is the next step. Listen as Kristiane Mandraki, director of business development and marketing at software developer fintech Praxent, details how financial institutions can leverage automation in their back-end processes to enhance their customer experience.

Businesses looking for quick credit-decisioning can benefit from financial reporting that gives banks a clear picture of data. Listen as Sid Saxena, chief executive of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered accounting automation platform Docyt discusses the technology, its integration and how lenders can benefit from automated accounting to streamline decision-making.

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 keeping cybersecurity agile goes far beyond yearly tweaks and minor investments, Shekher Puri, vice president of digital components and platforms at $1.4 trillion RBC, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.Cybersecurity is “an investment in perpetuity,” Puri says. “This is millions of dollars every single year that we're putting in and investing into these various technologies. Some of them are proprietary, and some of them we're going out to the marketplace, and we're looking at the best vendor solutions and the best supplier solutions.”Adding nuance to this “full-court press” approach, Puri tells BAN that tackling cybersecurity at the solution architecture stage of development is key to a top-quality technology and strategy stack.“Make sure that cybersecurity is built up a lot higher in the process,” Puri says. “They should be at the table as you're designing your product, as you're designing your experience, as you're designing your flow. They should not be an afterthought.”Listen as Puri details RBC’s cybersecurity and risk management approach for BAN, and discusses best practices for smaller banks embarking on the cybersecurity journey.

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. “Fraudsters will always attack a new vertical.” Socure works with five of the six biggest banks in the U.S., including Wells Fargo and Capital One, as well as digital banks Chime and SoFi.  BNPL is an attractive target for cybercriminals since the loans are submitted with little information for quick approval, making it challenging for companies to filter out fraudulent applications, Cook says on the podcast. There are two main ways to launch a synthetic fraud attack, he says, including “credit washing” one’s own credit report to artificially inflate the person’s credit rating and fabricating an account to open credit lines the fraudster has no intention of paying back.

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 conversation, Chief Executive Rana Gujral tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast, which provides a brief intro to the technology.  Behavioral Signals was founded in 2016 and with its tone determination technology, the company seeks to match each customer with the right service employee.  “In a conversation, there are two big elements,” Gujral says. “One is the spoken word, and then everything else that’s behind the spoken word or beyond the spoken word.”  Behavioral Signals’ technology measures conversational elements in real time, he tells BAN, and can place information in “buckets” of emotions, behaviors and propensities. From those elements and indicators, the company’s systems can determine tone and empathy 15% more accurately than a human.  Bank Automation Summit Fall 2022, taking place Sept. 19-20 in Seattle, is a crucial event on automation and automation technology in banking. Learn more and register for Bank Automation Summit Fall 2022.  

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 automation, he tells Bank Automation News, without naming the bank. The bank “during COVID times faced tremendous challenge, and now this has become the way of the business where we are helping them in the KYC process,” Seetharamiah told BAN. “There was a lot of human effort on this and historically, they felt there were errors, and all of that has been eliminated significantly.” IDP leverages a multitude of technologies to automate document processing, including machine learning, natural language processing and, on the back end, robotic process automation for integration.  Here, Seetharamiah shares how the technology can automate and add value for financial institutions with:  Customer onboarding;  Loan processing;  Loan dispersal;  Customer profile changes;   Regulatory compliance, including KYC; and  Risk mitigation.  Listen as Seetharamiah also offers advice for how financial institutions can get started and successfully implement IDP solutions.     

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 Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.   “It's projected that 50% of the U.S. workforce will earn a 1099 income by 2028,” says Parikh. “That's 90 million workers.” There are also opportunities for BaaS in the small- and mid-size business space, which includes close to 50% of the gross domestic product in the U.S., he notes. “This space where a small business owner spends more than five hours a week worrying about money, there's so much opportunity to make it easier for everybody to be able to move money,” he tells BAN. “There's a long way, in my opinion, of continuing to make the experience easier and easier for our consumer.” Parikh also discusses Green Dot’s core shift to Temenos Banking Cloud, where the company is providing BaaS products, and the role microservices play in its business strategy.  

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 in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  “A lot of the trust and the relationships at banks, particularly on the commercial side, is still human-centric,” Harrison says. “The differentiation and the value that a lot of these organizations still bring is the expertise and the guidance that they provide to these busy stakeholders.” Fifty-six percent of commercial banking executives say digital account opening is the No. 1 technology issue for business customers over the next five years, according to a recent study by Phoenix-based Catalyst Consulting Group. That report also noted that the difficulties with onboarding commercial clients come down to complex relationships and workflows. This, in turn, has led to barriers in automating key functions like verifying business entities, according to the report. Harrison tells BAN that regulatory requirements like knowing the beneficial ownership structure also bog down efforts to digitize commercial processes.  The Canadian-based company, founded in 2015, works with financial institutions such as BMO, BMO Harris and Manulife Financial, which owns John Hancock Financial in the U.S., to tackle this issue through its low-code solution, he explains.  Daylight Automation has raised $15.9 million over four funding rounds, according to Crunchbase. 

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, Vinay Prabhakar, vice president of global marketing at Volante, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. “When it comes to FedNow, or indeed, any new payment type, there are few separate factors that play into readiness,” Prabhakar says. “Community banks and credit unions are often dependent on their core providers. It's not a question of them being ready FedNow. It's a question of their core provider being ready for FedNow.” Not all core providers are equal; while some have fully embraced real-time payment (RTP) rails, others are still where they were when RTP was first launched in 2017, Prabhakar says. Larger banks that have already enabled enterprisewide payments automation have less to worry about.  “If a bank has already invested in real-time payments modernization, already connected to RTP, they've already 24/7 enabled their operation, and have familiarity of how to deal with ISO 2002 messages, then I think those banks will find it quite straightforward to go live with FedNow on Day One. Listen as Prabhakar talks FedNow readiness at financial institutions, along with possible hesitancy from large corporates to embrace large-value RTP.  

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” podcast. The cloud-based offering launched in November 2021.  “We'll have plans to continue to extend our presence in many more markets and languages in the coming months,” Borden tells Bank Automation News. “We're going to extend the Microsoft Cloud financial services capabilities in terms of reach and function, as well as geo locations.” There are also plans to build out the tech giant’s independent software vendor and partner community for financial services, he says. “If you can think of extending collaboration capabilities that we have naturally in our Microsoft Cloud set, a partner can actually start to build those into their application more readily out of the box to integrate with Office 365 or to integrate with teams, for example,” Borden tells BAN. While some financial institutions may worry about security in the cloud, Borden argues it can improve a bank’s overall security posture by removing it from individual silos and scaling through the cloud.  “There's a multitude of products that institutions have used almost as point solutions in silos. That can also add to the challenge or the problem,” Borden tells BAN. “Because as things are siloed, that opens up opportunities for identifying weaknesses, and so the idea of raising your security strategy platform up at a scale level, to manage across your entire enterprise — the cloud gives you the scale and the platform to do that.” During the podcast, Borden also discusses the proliferation of bad bots, other threats to financial institutions and how the cloud can help automate security. Artificial intelligence and analytics can be applied to threat monitoring in an integrated fashion, he adds. The $1.4 trillion TD Bank, Switzerland-based $1.1 trillion UBS and Netherlands-based $427 million ABN AMRO are among the financial institutions using Microsoft’s cloud services in conjunction with their multicloud environments, Borden says.  “The idea of having an integrated set of tools to do that from edge to cloud is architecturally what our strategy is about,” he says. “We provide a set of capabilities to do that.”   

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 cryptocurrency deposits within its blockchain-based Signet platform, according to its first-quarter earnings release.  But as financial players increase focus on crypto’s non-traditional capabilities and companies like Microsoft and Intuit enable full-scale crypto payments, the crypto use case for banks as a payment rail remains questionable at best, Gilles Ubaghs, Aite-Novarica strategic advisor and payments analyst, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  “Bitcoin, if you judge it purely as a payment tool, is pretty terrible,” Ubaghs says. “It's complicated to use the onramps and it's not that cheap. The volatility of pricing, everyone knows very well. But when you look at things like the speed of a transaction, Bitcoin’s transactions per second are about seven. Visa and MasterCard, they're in the 1,000s.” Crypto’s applications as a tradeable speculative asset, along with the tangible security applications of the blockchain, are worthwhile and should be tapped by banks, Ubaghs says. But before deploying boatloads of cash to create the next payment revolution, he advises banks to step back from the buzzwords and identify the use case at their institutions.  “My biggest advice to all banks today is to really take a look at what does this actually do,” Ubaghs tells BAN. “What problem does this solve? What does this do that can’t perhaps be solved better by another technology?” 

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 tackled rampant screen scraping to shore up security at Fidelity before becoming an independent entity, Anil Mahalaha, co-founder and head of solutions at Akoya, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. “Back in 2018, we were part of the fidelity access API group that was turning up APIs for Fidelity Investments,” Mahalaha says. “The reason we were doing that is because Fidelity realized the amount of screen scraping that was going on, which was really concerning to Fidelity, where the fintechs had Fidelity usernames and passwords. “What we started looking into is ‘how we can make it more secure for the customer and the customers’ data?,’” he says. As Fidelity was building out its APIs and tokenization capabilities, the investment firm noticed similar issues occurring at related companies, Mahalaha says, adding that fintechs were scraping “much more” than just usernames and passwords through their aggregators. This prompted Fidelity and Akoya to reach out.  “With the help of The Clearing House, back in February 2020, Akoya became an independent company, which is jointly owned by about 11 North American banks and Fidelity Investments,” Mahalaha says.  Listen as he talks best practices for banks engaging with new and challenging data and gives details into Akoya’s upcoming developments. 

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 of business development at automation lending company Upstart. In this episode of “The Buzz” podcast, he says the example is exactly how many banks approach their digitalization. “When we think of digitizing as the goal, you end up doing that — you digitize the old way of doing things,” Keltner tells Bank Automation News. “What people really want is an easier experience enabled by digital, and so digital isn't the goal, it's the tool.” The tool needs to create an easier process, and that’s where automation comes in, he says. For many banks, the process of identifying a customer became the digitalization of producing a license; banks simply asked customers to upload a picture of their identification. Then, a person will manually verify the ID rather than having software process the recognition of valid IDs, Keltner explains. “You uploaded the document from your phone, but you still waited two days for the person to review and get back to you as opposed to ‘Did I automate it and make that process easier for the consumer?’” he says. “Digital just gives you so many more tools, and so many ways to automate what used to be manual processes.” Listen as Keltner shares lending technology trends and what banks need to do to successfully automate lending processes.  

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’ podcast, the Buzz. "We'll use classical for some things and quantum for some things,” Mugel tells BAN. “Quantum computing is good at things like training machine learning models, which right now is costing an awful lot of energy and awful lots of our computational power. It's really good at things like really difficult optimization problems, which are everywhere, particularly in finance.” Mugel serves as chief technology officer at Multiverse Computing, a fintech specializing in quantum computing. He helped develop Multiverse’s Singularity, a spreadsheet application for quantum investment optimization that makes quantum algorithms accessible.  Mugel explains how quantum computing compares to traditional computing and what the technology means for the financial services industry.  He also shares how banks are already leveraging quantum computing, including the Bank of Canada. BBVA and Credit Agricole also are early Multiverse customers and early adopters of quantum computing. 

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 credit union grow origination annual assets to $15 billion and total assets to more than $34 billion in a few years' time, Jay Fee, PenFed vice president of consumer banking, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. “Origination annual assets when I got here a few years ago were $2 billion a year,” Fee says. “We're at around $15 billion for this year. That's been done through standing up a lot of new channels, a lot of new products, a lot of new automation features, and integration with over 35 different fintech partners.”  While customer response has been largely positive, Fee tells BAN that PenFed’s automation journey is only “halfway” done, with backlogs going well into 2023. Prioritization is essential for credit unions looking to improve technology processes, Adelina Grozdanova, head of investor group at banking fintech Upgrade, tells BAN. Upgrade offers digital banking, lending and card solutions to more than 100 credit unions and is one of PenFed’s fintech partners.  “We have to think about what else the credit union is working on,” Grozdanova says. “Some of them are thinking about core conversions. Some of them are thinking about improving their own member experience. Some of them are refreshing entire back-end systems. I think the first challenge for us is just making sure that we're in the right priority.” Listen as Fee and Grozdanova share insights and best practices for automating at community credit unions.  

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 commercial lending process.  Part of the goal is to address the costs of lending due diligence, which Ballard tells BAN are roughly the same whether for a $100,000 or $1 million loan, causing banks to favor larger loans yielding higher profits while smaller businesses miss out.  "Algorithms are a black box, and the vast majority of people who use them train their algorithms using data produced from biased human interactions," Ballard says. "If you're not intentional about removing those factors from your training set, really analyzing what data is creating bias, is it predicting if a loan will actually be charged off? It isn't."  BetaBank is partnering with Google and global professional services network Deloitte on its AI-based lending automation, which Ballard estimates will require about 66,000 software development hours. BetaBank should both be open for business and have the automated loan process in place late in 2022 or early 2023. The digital bank and AI solution represent something of a lifelong goal for Ballard, who says financially marginalized communities are sometimes left "in the shadows" of the banking system and have more trouble accessing needed business funds. They also pay higher interest rates, he notes.  It's also personal. When Ballard, who is Black, was a child, his father was denied a loan by 13 banks when he was looking to expand his logging business.  Ballard was approached in 2020 by Google, which he says shares a goal of fair access to capital, and Beta Financial sought Deloitte's services because of its deep market experience.    "Ultimately, for me, this is about measuring people — everybody — using the same yardstick," Ballard tells BAN in this podcast. "Not everybody is going to be approved, but if you look at them on the merits of how [their business] performs, I think you'll start seeing some equalization."  Help shape our agenda for the Bank Automation Summit by applying to join the speaker roster here. Potential speakers will be contacted and confirmed directly by the editorial team, and only qualified submissions will receive a response. Learn more about Bank Automation Summit Fall 2022.

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 to a survey by voice-based security, identity and intelligence platform provider Pindrop. These password challenges create a problem for the organizations that use them while not solving for fraud, contends Amit Gupta, vice president of product management, research and engineering at Pindrop, in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. “Essentially, those organizations are adding the friction to solve a problem that this is not even a solution to,” Gupta tells Bank Automation News. “That's where voice absolutely helps, but more than that, an enhanced authentication solution can help alleviate that pain and that bad customer experience and in fact, convert that to a great user experience.” The $805.9 billion BMO leverages Pindrop to reduce its incidences of fraud, according to Victor Tung, U.S. chief technology and operations officer and chief information and operations officer for BMO Capital Markets. “We started leveraging Pindrop data and some consortium data, and we eventually plug that into our workflow,” Tung said. “We have some automation AI on top of it. We saw great, great uplift” in fraud detection. Pindrop’s Gupta gives listeners a peak under the technology hood to explain how voice and voice data can reduce fraud. 

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 at core provider Finastra, tells Bank Automation News in today’s episode of “The Buzz.”  Finastra offers a range of cloud products, including Fusion Phoenix, and is partnered with banks including $762 million Seattle Bank and $210 million Puerto Rico Federal Credit Union. “The pandemic has shown people that, in reality, banks are not able to offer and deliver infrastructure or security or services like the cloud, with the ability of the cloud,” Mistry says. Streaming services are an example of successful cloud infrastructure from another industry, with providers offering always-on servicing and the ability to quickly scale alongside other business areas, he said.  “From that perspective, cloud is the inevitable solution for everyone,” Mistry adds.  When choosing between public and private clouds, bankers should weigh the benefits of in-house maintenance and cataloging against the cost of ownership, he said. While larger financial institutions may be able to afford a private cloud infrastructure, public clouds offer smaller banks lower costs and speedy experimentation rails.  “It’s important to think that, as much as I want to keep my technical capabilities within house, technicality can be looked after by professional capability, such as Microsoft Azure,” Mistry says in this podcast. “The banks can focus on much more of their business and their capabilities on what they can do and help serve the digital experience to customers. “But then again, it's all about the cost,” he adds.  

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 News. “You would have customers at the bank have a certain level of expectation, even back when I started in early 2000s, and that expectation has increased exponentially as they are users of new technology that are customer-facing, such as Uber, Lyft and even Amazon.” Chan wanted to be “on the right side of technology” and shape that future, he says in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. He also discusses what Prelim does — creating low-code solutions — and what it’s like as a fintech to integrate with core solutions.  In March, Prelim announced a $1.7 million funding round with EJF Capital, bringing its total amount raised to $3.8 million, according to Crunchbase. Chan explains what the company plans to do with that new money, as well as how it automates the customer journey in commercial banking and lending.  This interview is part of a new podcast series featuring startups from Bank Automation News’ Emerging Fintech Directory.  

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 these attacks is unprecedented, automation plays a surprising role, David Mattei, strategic advisor of fraud and anti-money-laundering at the company, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.“Fraudsters are really good at automation, and what that allows them to do is commit fraud at scale,” Mattei tells BAN. “Bots are one of the significant ways that it’s happening today. The other way is via a combination of automation and human fraud farms.”Fraud farms ensure humans step in for bots to complete manual inquiries that cybersecurity measures have made impossible to automate, like CAPTCHA requests and voice commands. This mix of automation and human input mirrors anti-fraud systems at the same financial institutions that fraudsters target, where process workflows and simple tasks are automated to ease workloads for employees.Regulatory developments in Europe have “squeezed the balloon” of financial services fraud, Mattei says, forcing cybercriminals away from tougher targets but failing to reduce the problem quantitatively. U.S. banks should adopt machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to increase stringency, he says.“I am expecting things to get worse before they get better here in the United States,” Mattei says.

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 firm Hexaware Technologies, on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. That can lead to problems like “cloud sprawl,” which happens when banks do not have a clear understanding of the scope of the cloud environment, as well as overspending in the cloud, he adds. “All of these are challenges that banks have to consider, technology and otherwise, from a change perspective when they're looking at moving to [the] cloud,” Banerjee says. “The good news is that none of these challenges are without solutions.” Banerjee offers advice to banks on avoiding these pitfalls: Realize that not all applications are fit for the cloud, start small and take simple steps. “If you fail to plan, you know, you're planning to fail,” Banerjee tells BAN. “Migrating legacy applications to cloud is in many ways at least as complex and difficult as a heart transplant so planning very well would be key to implementing some of these challenges.” Listen to this episode of “The Buzz” to hear Banerjee share tips on staffing for the cloud and learn why moving to the cloud can ultimately support automating processes. 

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 their customers struggling to keep up, Ginger Schmeltzer, strategic advisor at research firm Aite-Novarica, tells Bank Automation News in today’s episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  “Most of us who have worked at banks have lived this: legacy technology,” Schmeltzer says. “The payments spaghetti infrastructure that so many banks have — with 40- and 50-year-old core systems that have been added on to and added on to as new technologies and payments come along — make it difficult to introduce new payment technologies.” Technology is only one barrier, Schmeltzer adds. Reticence from both consumers and banks to support data sharing, regulatory concerns from government entities and the hypercompetitive nature of financial services in the U.S. make true interoperability an ongoing challenge for market players.  Schmeltzer sees new technologies playing a part in increasing interoperability in the United States.  “The growth of application programming interfaces (APIs) over the last five or six years has made a huge difference in the ability for various players to work together,” Schmeltzer tells BAN. “QR codes have really jumped up in visibility during the pandemic, as people are looking for contactless ways to interact. That is really helping to drive more interoperability in a lot of areas.” Listen as Schmeltzer explains what interoperability means for payments systems and explores how financial institutions can move towards facilitating the environment.  

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 vice president of Business Solutions for the Americas at Temenos, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz.” “There is complexity, and there is risk associated with AI,” Laws says. “But once you take care of that, and then have the right resources to know how to best access and then leverage that data — that very much helps manage the associated risks.” 

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 key information, Suarez explains. “[Bank have] got to look for a bunch of data points that will help them make the determination whether it's good or bad,” Suarez tells Bank Automation News. “We're very good at looking through them and pulling out all the things we are looking for, such as … what's the interest rate? What's the amount of this loan? [Has the consumer] been late paying? How many times were they late?”  

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 processes were not sustainable, Jo Jagadish, executive vice president and head of corporate products, services and innovation at TD, tells Bank Automation News in today’s episode of “The Buzz.” “We put in place, even pre-pandemic, products that enabled clients to really lean into the digitization of that back-end processing,” Jagadish says. “I think what was helpful, though, was that the pandemic helped accelerate the implementation of many of those conversations that were still on the cusp.”  Invoicing, documentation and payment workflows were automated for success across TD’s client base, and she adds that a pre-pandemic “integrated payable solution” saw high rates of adoption. Moving forward, accounts payable automation for TD’s commercial customers will be a key innovation point.  “We are looking over the next few months to enhance that capability to provide end-to-end accounts payable automation for the upper end of our community bank segment,” Jagadish says. “We really looked at the client base and tried to adopt the pricing, the packaging and the solution for the lower end of the spectrum while also solving for our middle market customer base.” Listen as TD’s Jagadish talks automation hurdles for commercial payments and best practices for banks embarking on an automation journey.  

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 increase productivity and efficiency for remaining talent, CEO Bill Clark tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  “What can banks and credit unions do to attract and retain the talent?,” Clark asks. “I do not think people can plan to win that. They should try to attract and retain as many people as they can. But to plan to be fully staffed with the capabilities that you want, I think is difficult.” “Emphasis needs to shift from thinking you're going to be fully staffed all the time with the best people to getting the most productivity out of the people you have,” Clark adds.  Clark also outlines the need to eliminate “silver bullet” approaches to digitization and automation at financial institutions, telling BAN that “you have to think about the sum total of interactions that your customers want to have with you, and how to optimize your operations to serve them well in the most efficient way possible.” Listen as Clark discusses tech talent, digital transformation and more in this podcast. 

In this Weekly Wrap episode of “The Buzz” podcast, the Bank Automation News team discusses the recent Bank Automation Summit 2022 with recorded conversations from the panel “Modernizing Commercial Lending Through Automation.” Listen to find out how technology experts are deploying automation for commercial lending success in the wake of disruption and digitization. This episode features: Atul Verma, CIO of personal and business banking at BMO; Daniel Seay, senior vice president and director of wholesale transformation at Fifth Third Bank; Chris Gufford, general manager of commercial product at nCino; and Karen Oakland, vice president of industry marketing at Smart Communications. Automating data capturing streamlines underwriting and decisioning processes for banks, Seay tells attendees. “It takes longer to do a renewal than it does a new money deal. And intuitively, that makes no sense,” Seay says. “Once you start to capture the data, where you can then use it, snapshot it and say only four data elements changed from the last time we did this. That really starts to change the game.” 

To poorly automate a process, use technology as the starting point rather than the ideation process, Pepe Porrata, chief operating officer at $731.7 million bank Varo Bank, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of "The Buzz.” This is because banks can “automate poorly designed experiences that are built to manage unnecessary complexity,” Porrata said. “So you got to really shift the way people think about this thing. You got to start with complexity first.” In this excerpt from the Bank Automation Summit, which took place recently in Charlotte, N.C., industry leaders discuss the role technology — particularly cores — plays in ideation. Joining this conversation are:  Ganesh Krishnan, enterprise chief information officer at PNC Financial Services Group;  Abhijit Chaudhary, chief product officer at Green Dot Corp.; and  Alex Sion, managing director and head of market growth at Citi Ventures. 

A growing number of community banks are considering adding cryptocurrency services, and it could give them an edge in the battle for digital customers. Thirty percent of community banks expect to add crypto to their offerings over during the next 18 months, according to a report by financial consultancy Wipfli. Crypto gives community banks an edge in the battle for digital customers, but implementation hinges on regulatory guidance, Anna Kooi, national financial services leader at Wipfli, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  “I think in 2022, it's not going to be a trickle effect,” Kooi says. “We're going to see a windfall, particularly if the Federal Reserve and the OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] come out with regulation to clarify where and how they are looking at crypto, or if the Federal Reserve is looking at offering CBDC [Central Bank Digital Currency].” “If that were to come out, you will see even more jumping into this space,” she adds. Listen as Kooi talks crypto at community banks, along with the outlook of financial institutions that fail to adapt to an increasingly digital banking environment.  

University Credit Union saved nearly $2 million in expenses and revenue gains in the first 12 months after launching its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual assistant Royce in August 2020. The savings easily amounted to more than the cost of the technology and allocations made to support the bot, says David Tuyo, president and CEO of the $1.1 billion Los Angeles-based credit union, in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  Tuyo now encourages other banks and credit unions to embrace AI-powered bots. 

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — In this Weekly Wrap episode of “The Buzz” podcast, the Bank Automation News team pivots to an excerpt from the Bank Automation Summit 2022 held in Charlotte, N.C., March 1-2. Learn how blockchain is being deployed at TIAA and other banks to both automate and solve unique business problems. This episode features Russell Schwartz, senior director of payments product management at TIAA, and Ananth Subramanya, senior vice president of digital business at HCL Technologies, each of whom shares his perspectives on how blockchain can innovate in the financial services sector. This week’s podcast is from the BAS panel discussion on “Leveraging Smart Contracts and Blockchain for Smarter Banking.” Tune in next week for more insights from the Bank Automation Summit. 

While big banks mobilize billions in tech development, community banks are continuing their own technology journeys through fintech investment. Fintechs provide community banks with unique opportunities to digitize the customer experience, Boyce Adams, senior vice president at payments fintech AvidXchange, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  “Your community or regional bank is going to be investing into different type of fintech applications that help power their solution set,” Adams says. “There's good reason for that. At the end of the day, the core business is still writing loans, managing people's money and moving money.” Listen as Adams discusses the potential for bank and fintech investments, along with the impact of FedNow on payment data flows and the revenue potential of real-time payments for banks.  

Citizens Commercial Banking surveyed 260 corporate decision makers and found that 85% are looking to banks to provide real-time payment solutions — ranking it higher than other banking priorities such as lowest-cost financing. It’s a seismic shift resulting from the pandemic, Matthew Richardson, head of product solutions at Citizens Commercial Banking, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. “Post-pandemic, there's even a higher demand to want to digitize and automate processes,” Richardson says. “They’re looking for a bank that is participating in and offering real-time payments. It’s a signal that the bank is serious about enabling digital transformation and is ready for the future of payments.” 

The Biden administration plans to increase anti-corruption efforts in financial services with new anti-money laundering (AML) regulations in corporate banking and cryptocurrency.  The threat of government action against banks and cybercriminals is significant, Daniel Hazel, head of customer lifecycle management  at intelligent automation fintech WorkFusion, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  The “United States Strategy on Countering Corruption,” released by the White House in December, outlined newly expanded tools for prosecuting money laundering offenses. The Department of Justice can now subpoena select overseas financial records and will also utilize the newly created National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team to investigate misuse of digital exchanges and assets. “The ability to subpoena banks who have a correspondent banking relationship in the U.S., and to have that threat hanging over their banking institution, is important,” Hazel tells BAN. “No matter what you say and no matter what any bank would say, the threat of a subpoena by a U.S. court is immense.” Listen as Hazel discusses the impact of the announcement in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  

In this Weekly Wrap episode of “The Buzz” podcast, the Bank Automation News editors drill down on what Russia’s threats to retaliate against U.S. sanctions could mean for the banking industry.  BAN spoke with experts who agree: Financial services companies, particularly regional banks, in the U.S. should be on heightened alert as cyberattacks are likely as the war on Ukraine escalates. To prepare, check out BAN’s list of 33 questions every banker should ask ahead of potential cyberwarfare. Other news this week comes from the bank technology space, with SoFi’s acquisition of core banking platform Technisys for $1.1B in stock. The BAN team also discusses the Biden administration’s plans to increase anti-corruption regulations in financial services. Tune in for a discussion of these topics and what’s ahead in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap with BAN Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson and Associate Editor Alijah Poindexter for the week ended Feb. 25, 2022. 

That led to volatility in the system that became even more pronounced when the “Great Resignation” hit, Sam Bobley, founder and CEO of intelligent document automation company Ocrolus, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz.” “The Great Resignation” is what pundits are calling the high resignation rates and labor shortages that businesses have been facing since 2021. “Lenders had more difficulty determining how many applications might come in the next month. When you couple that with the problem of people working from home, people resigning or leaving their job security issues, all these other issues that came about, it became really clear to lenders that they don't want to be in the supply-and-demand game,” Bobley tells BAN. “If there's a better way for them [lenders] to manage their workforce by using automation to more effectively flex up and flex down resources, they are interested in doing that.” In this podcast, Bobley discusses the factors behind the Great Resignation and how automation can take over more mundane tasks to provide employees at lenders and other financial institutions with more time for meaningful work. 

In this Weekly Wrap episode of “The Buzz” podcast, the Bank Automation News team dives into the latest round of core provider earnings along with a look at a new acquisition for workflow automation vendor Nintex.  Temenos and FIS released their Q4 2021 earnings this week, revealing tech revenue growth and new expansion efforts. Temenos touted its U.S. expansion, mentioning partnerships with banking fintech Green Dot and $37 billion Commerce Bank, while FIS announced its acquisition of embedded finance fintech Payrix.  Workflow automation vendor Nintex announced its acquisition of robotic process automation (RPA) vendor Kryon, leveraging Kryon as its next-generation RPA capability. The move will also integrate Kryon’s process mining and discovery technology into Nintex’s Process Platform. Listen as BAN Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson and Associate Editor Alijah Poindexter discuss these topics, along with Jack Henry’s modernized banking strategy, in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap.  

Core provider Jack Henry’s open banking strategy will facilitate a fintech-enabled digital ecosystem for community banks as a response to a widespread shift in the financial services landscape.  The fintech disruptions and digital innovation that have caused sweeping changes in financial services have pushed local and regional banks to adjust. As community banks manage the shifting landscape, they must also take notice of the consumer push for open banking, Jack Henry Chief Executive David Foss says in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. “There's been this real groundswell of open banking demand in the United States,” Foss tells Bank Automation News. “People are telling their financial institution that if they can't get data out of their financial institution to share with whoever they need to share it with, they'll find a different financial institution.” Listen as Foss shares the details of Jack Henry’s open banking roadmap, along with observations on the implementation of digital banking innovations.  

In this Weekly Wrap episode of “The Buzz” podcast, the Bank Automation News team discusses the big trend this week in banking technology: the shift to cloud services. The cloud-focused news started Monday, with news that Fiserv will acquire cloud-native digital banking solution Finxact. This is the first true cloud-native core banking solution running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for Fiserv, said David Albertazzi, director of Aite-Novarica Group’s retail banking and payments practice. BAN shares his insights into the core market’s race to the cloud. Core provider Jack Henry and Associates also revealed this week that they’ve been pursuing a cloud strategy for two years. Associate Editor Alijah Poindexter provides the details about that plan, gleaned from this week’s Jack Henry earnings call. The team also notes the historical significance of NCR’s plan to shift the bulk of its revenue to services and software from hardware. Tune in for a discussion of more finance-related cloud news, as well as a peek at what’s ahead, in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap with Poindexter and BAN Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson for the week ended Feb. 11, 2022. 

Truist Financial was formed through the 2019 merger of BB&T and SunTrust — the largest bank merger in the past 20 years — and is the first substantial merger with a full digital component.The Charlotte, N.C.-based Truist faced the added challenge of merging just before the pandemic started, Ken Meyer, Truist’s chief information officer of consumer technology, says in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.“We were officially three or four months old when everybody went home,” Meyer tells Bank Automation News. “We were just getting to know each other and getting started on this journey, and then everybody got sent home.”

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI), such as chatbots and virtual assistants, should serve as a facilitator of enhanced communications between financial institutions and their customers rather than functioning as tech for tech’s sake.  Key to a successful conversational AI framework is the ability to “orchestrate” a conversation between an agent and customer, providing context for both parties and increasing interaction value, Tony Lorentzen, senior vice president of intelligent engagement at AI software firm Nuance Communications, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. An example of this is an interactive voice response application (IVR) determining the intent of the call for the agent. “You shouldn't structure conversational AI as a blocker to an agent. What you need to be thinking about is how do you how do you orchestrate a conversation?” Lorentzen says. “If you're a high-level consumer who's transferring funds, you dial into an IVR and say what your intent is. The IVR can determine who you are, then send you to an agent.” Lorentzen shares techniques for successful conversational AI implementation, including voice biometrics and customer sentiment analysis, along with the importance of automation for customer and employee experience.  

In this Weekly Wrap episode of “The Buzz” podcast, the Bank Automation News team looks at a new type of ransomware attack on a U.S. bank, along with an FBI warning cautioning consumers on quick response (QR) code payments.  White Rabbit, a new family of ransomware, attacked a U.S. bank in December 2021. While details are lacking, the attack could have a connection to Fin8, a group of financially motivated cybercriminals which previously attacked the retail, hospitality and entertainment industries. The attack appears to be in the testing phase, according to cybersecurity firm Trend Micro.  On the consumer side, the FBI released a warning in January on fraud threats in QR code payments. Fraudsters either manipulate existing QR codes or create new ones, tricking consumers into providing sensitive financial information through fraudulent payment terminals. Risks include malware, passcode and information theft, and consumers are warned to take heightened precautions.  Listen in for a discussion of these topics, along with TD Bank Group’s Azure-leveraged partnership with software company Databricks, in today’s Weekly Wrap episode with BAN Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson and Associate Editor Alijah Poindexter.  

Banks must fully commit to the cloud in their digital banking strategies while also using cloud adoption as a rallying point for end-to-end automation, Paul Taylor, chief executive of cloud core provider Thought Machine, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. In the wake of COVID-19, many banks shifted their internal and external processes to a cloud-enabled digital format, which could withstand the disruption of the pandemic and its ensuing fallout. However, there is a significant difference between simply adopting a cloud platform and becoming fully cloud native in all technical aspects.  “If you don't play to the cloud strengths, what's the point? You're effectively just outsourcing the hardware maintenance of the system, but you haven't really changed much else,” Taylor tells BAN. “Fully embracing cloud-native means that you put applications in containers, run them in pods, and maintain elastic scalability. That really gives you a huge advantage.” “Embrace and commit to it rather than just getting your own software to run on it,” he adds. Listen as Taylor discusses best practices in banking cloud adoption, along with the potential risk factors of over-automation.  

In this Weekly Wrap episode of “The Buzz” podcast, the Bank Automation News editors drill down on technology spending at banks. After the COVID-19 pandemic led to a holding pattern for IT budgets in 2020 and the first half of 2021, tech spending is on the rise again with large banks increasing or planning to increase technology spend. The $432.4 billion Capital One, for example, revealed that its technology-related spend increased 11% year over year. In addition, the BAN team looks at how the digital-native $35 million Locality Bank — which launched earlier this month — is leveraging Nymbus’ digital banking core. The editors also share Quontic Bank’s suggestions for how to create a culture of digital banking.

The buy now, pay later industry (BNPL) provides an innovation rail for alternative lending processes and real-time fund access, but it is also opening doors for advanced fraud techniques.  Synthetic fraud poses an especially dangerous risk, Featurespace founder Dave Excell tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. Featurespace uses machine learning and behavioral analysis to facilitate anti-fraud measures for financial service companies. BNPL providers see most fraud occur at the onboarding, where identity and documentation must be provided in a process similar to opening a bank or credit card account. Cybercriminals create fake accounts using falsified information, which is then used to access products and services, Excell explains. “We've seen significant growth, especially in the U.S. market, around synthetic fraud,” Excell tells BAN. “So, where you're using stolen identity information mixed with fake information, almost like a synthetic person, which will clear certain validation checks.” Listen to glean insights on regulatory compliance and how BNPL providers can manage and mitigate fraud. 

The $653.6 billion Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce on Jan. 13 became the latest of the Bix Six Canadian banks to select the nCino Bank Operating System for its business clients.  Half of Canada's largest banks now use the cloud banking and loan automation firm, Cameron Sterrett, managing director of nCino's Canadian business, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of "The Buzz" podcast. Key to nCino's expansion in Canada is that its banking solution is built on the Salesforce platform, features an open application programming interface (API) and offers a range of functionality out of the box, Sterrett noted. CIBC chose the company because it wants to modernize its small business banking platform and grow its portfolio while improving both the internal banker experience and commercial client experience, Sterrett said.  Tune in to learn more about the technologies these banks can expect to leverage in the coming year. nCino shares [NASDAQ: NCNO] closed at $44.61 today, up 7.03% from market open.  Bank Automation Summit, taking place March 1-2 in Charlotte, is the first and only event to focus solely on automation in banking. The event will feature the brightest minds from across financial services on intelligent automation strategies and deployment. Learn more and register here for Bank Automation Summit 2022.

The BAN team covers JP Morgan Chase's report that revealed the $3.7 trillion bank is increasing its 2022 technology spend by 20% to $14.4 billion to improve cloud capabilities, data centers, data and analytics, and digital consumer experience. Meanwhile, Wells Fargo has seen a nearly 50% year-over-year increase in digital payments through Zelle, and the $1.95 trillion bank plans to build out its mobile banking offerings for both consumers and businesses, the BAN team notes.  The editors also run down news from the $3.1 trillion Bank of America and $187.5 billion Citizens Financial Group, which both saw significant net income gains last year compared with 2020, largely due to digital channels, services and sales. The two banks are leaning heavily on digital banking and products for future growth.  Tune in for a discussion of these topics and what's ahead in today's episode of the Weekly Wrap with BAN Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson and Associate Editors Aaron Marsh and Alijah Poindexter for the week ended Jan. 21, 2022. Bank Automation Summit, taking place March 1-2 in Charlotte, N.C., is the first and only event to focus solely on automation in banking. The event will feature the brightest minds from across financial services on intelligent automation strategies and deployment. Learn more and register for Bank Automation Summit 2022.

The most common mistake that companies make with the data when de-biasing artificial intelligence models is to remove obvious indicators such as race, gender and age, and then assume they’ve eliminated bias, David Van Bruwaene tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. Van Bruwaene is the founder and CEO of Canada-based Fairly.AI, which provides an artificial intelligence (AI) governance, risk and compliance solution for automating model risk management in financial services and other industries.  Removing indicators can make bias more difficult to detect, Van Bruwaene says, but without identifiers to help detect bias, there is no opportunity to make algorithm adjustments to correct for it. Van Bruwaene breaks down for BAN listeners what banks can do to prepare data ahead of building models and explains the standards available to guide the creation of AI models. He also shares his advice for how banks and credit unions can stay ahead of potential regulations related to AI bias.   

Bank Automation News digs into a study from digital banking solutions provider Infosys Finacle that surveyed more than 1,165 executives at banks of all types regarding their use of retail digital banking technology.  "Almost 36% of bankers believe that the big tech players like Apple and Google or leading consumer technology companies like Amazon will lead the way in terms of payments business and cards business, as well as some of the digital delivery of banking services," Rajashekara Maiya, vice president of global business consulting at digital banking solutions provider Infosys Finacle, told BAN.  The study dives into banks' innovation successes during the COVID-19 pandemic, banks' maturity with digital transformation, how banks will be focusing their digital banking spending, whether banks increased or decreased particular digital banking investments, and how much success — or lack thereof — banks have had with specific digital banking technologies, including open banking application programming interfaces (APIs), mobile banking apps and blockchain technology.  Among other areas, the study looked at where banks expect the most innovation will take place over the next five years and found that:  ·       53% of respondents expect it will be in bank product delivery; ·       20% said they expect the most innovation in individual bank products; ·       17% said they anticipate the biggest innovation will come from industry players that will compete with traditional banks; and ·       11% said they expect the most innovation in consumption of bank product use, or changes from the end user perspective.  Other items the study addressed include how banks rate their ability to keep up with new ideas in the market and how successful they've been in addressing legacy technology and system integrations.  Bank Automation Summit, taking place March 1-2 in Charlotte, is the first and only event to focus solely on automation in banking. The event will feature the brightest minds from across financial services on intelligent automation strategies and deployment. Learn more and register here for Bank Automation Summit 2022.

In this Weekly Wrap episode of “The Buzz” podcast, the Bank Automation News team talks findings in Microsoft’s Work Trend Index Frontline Workers survey, which found that more than 40% of the global workforce plans on quitting their job this year. The survey also revealed that two-thirds of banking and financial services employees feel supported and pleased about workplace technology.  The BAN team also discusses the launch of a digital wallet solution that provides employees instant access to their earned wages, along with the ability to transfer funds and make real-time payments to a range of institutions. Finally, the team discusses the first BAN survey roundup, which is set to become a regular feature on the site.  Listen in for a discussion of these topics and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap podcast, with BAN Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson and Associate Editors Aaron Marsh and Alijah Poindexter for the week ended Jan. 14, 2022. 

Financial institutions should prepare for widespread use of real-time payments in the coming months, as well as the resulting security risks, group president of enterprise banking at core provider Computer Services Inc. (CSI) shares in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. CSI’s Giovanni Mastronardi discusses how the Federal Reserve-backed instant Automated Clearing House (ACH) transactions, along with the prevalence of real-time payment platforms like Venmo and PayPal, will foster innovation for community banks and their customers. “There’s going to be some competition,” Mastronardi tells Bank Automation News. “You're going to have merchants who can do the ACH and might feel better about it. Can I do a real-time ACH for less per transaction than if I take a debit transaction?” Real-time payments will also afford fraudsters the ability to bypass standard security measures, like two-step authentication and “card not present” purchase alerts, he cautions, adding that financial service providers must adapt their security strategies. “As the entire world becomes real-time, no longer is two-factor authentication going to be considered quite as secure,” Mastronardi says. “We're in the process of looking at things like keystroke and mouse tracking. If I'm on my computer, it can tell it's me and not somebody who's taken over for me.” While community banking customers may initially resist added security measures, the end result is a safe and deeply automated experience, he says. 

In this Weekly Wrap episode of "The Buzz" podcast, the Bank Automation News editors unpack  what could become a trend in regulatory fines in 2022 as well as predictions for core and cloud banking.   The BAN team addresses one automation company's prediction that repeat errors stemming from spreadsheets and other manual process could soon see much bigger fines from U.S. regulators. The team also drills down on core and cloud industry predictions[JC1] [AM2]  and the role microservices will play in financial services this year.  Tune in for a discussion of these topics and more in today's episode of the Weekly Wrap with BAN Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson and Associate Editors Aaron Marsh and Alijah Poindexter for the week ended Jan. 7, 2022. Bank Automation Summit, taking place March 1-2 in Charlotte, N.C., is the first and only event to focus solely on automation in banking. The event will feature the brightest minds from across financial services on intelligent automation strategies and deployment. Learn more and register for Bank Automation Summit 2022.

In this episode of “The Buzz, Bank Automation News speaks with financial services and technology attorney Josias “Joe” Dewey on automating financial contracts. A software developer who is also a partner at the international law firm Holland & Knight, Dewey helps banks automate loan and financial documents. He also co-authored “The Blockchain: A Guide for Legal and Business Professionals.”

Banks and fintechs implementing open application programming interface (API) builds should look first to security measures as early security and authentication checks prevent up to 80% of risk vectors in API frameworks, Jason Harmon, chief technology officer at API design and development company Stoplight, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.

In this Weekly Wrap episode of "The Buzz" podcast, the Bank Automation News editors discuss HSBC and IBM's use of distributed ledger technology to conduct commercial central bank digital currency (CBDC) transactions, including foreign exchange settlements.  The BAN team also addresses a prediction from the Canadian Prepaid Providers Organization and Aite-Novarica Group that the Canadian prepaid payments market will reach $6.77 billion in one-time card and account "loads" by the end of the year, a nearly 100% increase since 2019. Finally, the team dives into how machine learning and automation can help banks identify fraud and money laundering more efficiently.  Tune in for a discussion of these topics and more in today's episode of the Weekly Wrap with BAN Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson and Associate Editors Aaron Marsh and Alijah Poindexter for the week ended Dec. 17, 2021.Bank Automation Summit, taking place March 1-2 in Charlotte, N.C., is the first and only event to focus solely on automation in banking. The event will feature the brightest minds from across financial services on intelligent automation strategies and deployment. Learn more and register for Bank Automation Summit 2022.

Digital banking usage is up at Citizens, with 90% of consumers and 86% of businesses reporting that they use digital channels for their banking needs — a significant increase over usage during COVID-19 lockdowns, says Beth Johnson, chief experience officer at Citizens Financial Group, in this episode of "The Buzz" podcast. Last year, 85% of consumers and 71% of businesses reported using digital channels. "Digital is here to stay, and that's not really surprising to me when you think about our daily lives," Johnson tells Bank Automation News. The $187.5 billion Citizens recently released its Banking Experience Survey 2021, which this year polled approximately 1,000 consumers and 260 business leaders.  For financial advice and more complex transactions, nearly two-thirds of consumers and businesses want human interaction, the survey found. That's about the same for consumers in 2020, but down from 73% for businesses in 2020.  Those findings could be instructive for banks and financial institutions to focus branch personnel on more complex interactions, Johnson notes, but they also point to the opportunity for virtual consults — such as video chats via digital channels — which are becoming a preference for customers.  Sixty-five percent of consumers and 82% of businesses said they feel at least "somewhat comfortable" sharing additional information and data with banks for a more tailored customer experience, according to the survey.  "In a digital transformation, think about that also as a data and analytics transformation," Johnson tells BAN. "Our clients really want us to be able to provide them keen insight."  Banks and financial institutions need to make that insight personal for each customer — and automation can play a critical role in that, Johnson explains.

SentiLink co-founder and CEO Naftali Harris tells Bank Automation News how the rise in automated payments adds gravity to the identity verification and fraud prevention ecosystem, details automated fraud prevention processes, and offers predictions for what’s next for fraud in 2022.

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent shut down has led to a significant increase among consumers adopting digital technologies to interact with the world. Now is an especially exciting time for financial services, Vince Passione, CEO of lending platform and online marketplace LendKey, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of "The Buzz” podcast.

In this week’s episode of “The Buzz” podcast, the Bank Automation News editors unpack the recent earnings report for robotic process automation company UiPath, and its plans for expanding its solution in a discussion on why UiPath might have mergers and acquisitions ahead.

Banks turn to the cloud to build new services, leverage infrastructure. In this week’s podcast the Bank Automation News editors discuss the technology lessons that can be gleaned from this week’s earnings calls from the “Big Six” Canadian banks. The Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, National Bank of Canada, Bank of Montreal and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce reported earnings. Technology-related announcements played a key role in the calls, with automation, cloud and products that offer personalized financial advice platforms being a focus for the banks.

With some $350 billion in U.S. tax refunds given each year, three fintechs have teamed up for Tax Refund Unlock, a new service that offers consumers ongoing, incremental access to the money they would normally receive as a single payment after filing their annual tax returns.  The partnership includes Salt Lake City-based Atomic, a provider of application programming interface (API) payroll integration whose direct deposits payroll offering covers about 75% of the U.S. workforce; Chicago-based financial services platform Klover; and San Francisco-based startup Column Tax, which provides personal income tax software.    Tax Refund Unlock builds on an existing relationship between Atomic and Klover that allows users of the financial platform to access their incoming paychecks early. With Column Tax's income tax capabilities folded in, users will be able to complete a short tax questionnaire and link to their payroll data. The new solution projects users' tax refund total, which then becomes available to Klover users incrementally throughout the year, with an amount added to each paycheck. Members of Klover+, a premium service that costs $2.50 per month, will have access to the service at no additional charge.  In this episode of "The Buzz" podcast, Lindsay Davis, head of markets at Atomic, tells Bank Automation News that the new service targets consumers who might typically access high-cost payday loans and are at risk of bank overdrafts.  "People who've been working hourly jobs were severely hit" during the pandemic, Davis says, "and a lot of bills are about to come due." She notes that programs put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic such as rent or student loan forgiveness are expiring.  Atomic was founded in 2019 and in October raised $22 million in a series A funding round, bringing its total to $38.6 million in funding. Klover was also founded in 2019 and has raised a total of $68 million in three funding rounds, according to Crunchbase, while Column Tax, founded in 2021, this month raised $5.1 million in a seed funding round, which it said it will use to expand Tax Refund Unlock adoption.  

As interest and investment in cryptocurrency spikes this year, banks and financial institutions (FIs) must decide whether and how to become involved, or potentially lose revenue and customers if they opt out.  This is the message from Lawrence Pruss, senior vice president at Memphis, Tenn.-based Strategic Resource Management (SRM) in this week's episode of "The Buzz" podcast. SRM is a consulting firm for FIs and others in areas such as digital transformation, operational efficiency and payment technology.  Banks and FIs can boost their revenue by offering crypto trading and custody services, among other services,  Pruss tells Bank Automation News. "The opportunity isn't just defending their deposits, but there's opportunities to drive non-interest income in terms of trading revenue," he says.    There is also potential to attract new customers and increase customer engagement, Pruss notes, as well as help to retain existing clients. "That's an opportunity — when you've got those eyeballs on your mobile banking app — to be able to offer across all other sorts of products and services, maybe even education" on cryptocurrency, he tells BAN, which is still lacking in many cases.  Banks and FIs have been contacting SRM regarding its new service, Cryptocurrency and Blockchain for Financial Services, which advises on the use cases of crypto and blockchain technology and how to set them up, to be sure they're not written out of the script, Pruss says. Decentralized finance, which has sprung out of cryptocurrency and its underpinning blockchain technology, connects lenders and borrowers while facilitating other financial transactions, all without the involvement of a bank.  "We've got some real concern from our clients in terms of being disintermediated," Pruss says. "All of a sudden, you realize it's a very competitive environment."

Embracing blockchain, RegTech and payments among recommendations. In this week’s episode of “The Buzz” podcast, Anand Subbaraman, Finastra’s senior vice president and general manager of cloud, core and digital banking discusses with Bank Automation News three strategies he believes banks need to embrace: a broader product portfolio, new technologies such as blockchain, and regulatory challenges as a business issue.

Weekly Wrap discussion on how Temenos is accelerating innovation  Core and digital banking provider boosts developer access, highlights use cases In this week's "Weekly Wrap" podcast, the Bank Automation News team discusses some of the latest from core and digital banking solutions provider Temenos gleaned from its SCALE developer conference, where the company showcased how it is fostering innovation and bringing new fintech ideas to market faster.  In a similar vein, the team addresses the newly available Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services and how MS partners are integrating their solutions — including building on top of Microsoft cloud computing power and software to enhance and expand their offerings. Finally, BAN explores some of the latest financial crime trends in markets and the broader financial services ecosystem, as seen by global market solutions provider Nasdaq.  Find a discussion of these topics and more in today's episode of the "Weekly Wrap" with BAN Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson and Associate Editor Aaron Marsh for the week ended Nov. 19, 2021.

This week, the Bank Automation News team discusses what banks are doing to make it possible for customers to invest in cryptocurrency and how financial institutions can leverage blockchain beyond crypto. The BAN team also drills down on the growing popularity of buy now, pay later solutions in Mexico, where BNPL is being marketed as a tool to help the underserved rather than a credit card replacement. Finally, BAN looks at how BMO’s cloud-first strategy is paying off. Find a discussion of these topics and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap with JJ Hornblass, BAN Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson and Associate Editor Aaron Marsh for the week ended Nov. 11, 2021.

The automation company WorkFusion, which offers a packaged solution to financial institutions and counts the $1.7 trillion Deutsche Bank and the $4.1 billion Carter Bank & Trust among its customers, will focus on shifting its own premise solution to the cloud. In this week’s episode of The Buzz, WorkFusion’s new CEO, Adam Famularo, discusses how the company is building out a software-as-a-service delivery model and offering financial services a cloud-based option, in addition to the managed services offering for banks to run behind their firewall. “We're investing a lot in cloud, that's going to be kind of, of course, our next evolution for our customers,” Famularo told Bank Automation News. “We already today can deliver and manage services, we already today can help them install in their own local cloud.” The New York-based WorkFusion was founded in 2011 and has raised   $341.3 million in funding over seven rounds. Their latest funding was raised on March9 from a Series F round totaling $220 million. Famularo came to the company from erwin, which specializes in data modeling and data governance. In this podcast, Famularo said how data flows is key to understanding the flow of work processes, which in turn is essential for automation. “Understanding your data is understanding the business processes that supported the data,” Famularo said. 

Artificial intelligence can pick up on patterns humans would ignore — patterns that can indicate crime in cross border payments, for instance. In this week’s episode of the Buzz, Yaron Hazan, vice president of regulatory affairs for cybercrime and big data analytics vendor ThetaRay, breaks down for Bank Automation News how the tool’s machine learning and AI discovered an unusual pattern in cross-border payments processed by a bank. The transactions were labeled as medical tourism but hid a much darker secret - child trafficking.  Twenty-seven percent of human trafficking victims are children, according to the United Nations. By leveraging machine learning and AI technologies, financial institutions can help stop this and other horrific crime rings that he struggled to stop during his time in the Israeli military and law enforcement, Hazan says.   “After 25 years of career of chasing bad guys, feeling that I'm one step ahead of them is a very good feeling,” Hazan says. “In terms of the industry, and even humanity, when we think about child trafficking, terrorist funding, and all these worst phenomena that we think that are impossible to manage to detect to fight against, I say it’s possible.”

The latest trend in digital banking customer experience is adding on-screen voice, which allows customers to switch from chat or other self-serve experiences to speaking with a person within a mobile app or digital banking site. In this week’s episode of “The Buzz” podcast, Dan Michaeli, CEO and co-founder of customer service platform Glia, tells Bank Automation News that on-screen voice allows customers to stay within the banking app, webpage or application, and transition to a customer service representative without starting from scratch.  “Instead of displaying that number and having the customer member dial that phone number and leave the digital banking experience, leave the loan application, leave mobile banking and start from scratch in a telephony centric experience, they can click a button that says ‘talk to us now,’” Michaeli said. “The agent … can see in real time what the customer is doing, and then they can jump in and collaborate with the customer to guide them to resolution.” The New York-based Glia, which manages voice, video and browsing solutions and supports several chatbots, in September announced a partnership with financial services-focused chatbot vendor Kasisto. In this podcast, Michaeli and BAN discuss the “holy grail” of digital customer service and the mistake most financial institutions make, when it comes to digital customer service. 

Facebook for years may have topped cybersecurity firm Vade’s “Phishers’ Favorites,” a report of the most impersonated brands in phishing attacks, but the $2 trillion Credit Agricole bank recently edged out the social media giant with 17,755 unique phishing URLs. Facebook’s topple from the No. 1 spot was a surprise, Adrien Gendre, chief product officer at the AI-based cybersecurity firm, tells Bank Automation News in this week’s episode of “The Buzz.” “Facebook has been the top of that list for four years,” Gendre says. “Obviously, Credit Agricole is less famous worldwide than Facebook.”  Credit Agricole wasn’t the only financial institution to make the list. Seven others, including $3.7 trillion Chase, $1.9 trillion Wells Fargo and $2.98 trillion HSBC, ranked in the top-25 brands used in cyberattacks that leverage fake websites and emails to gain credentials from unsuspecting employees and customers. In this podcast, Gendre and BAN explore how banks became a popular lure for phishing schemes, and what financial institutions can do to protect their brands. 

Payments remain an essentially manual process despite the move toward automation, Steve Kramer, vice president of product at billing and payments platform PayNearMe, explains in this week’s episode of “The Buzz.”    In this podcast, Kramer sits down with Bank Automation News to discuss how banks can automate payments to reduce customer friction, including options for digitizing cash and digital wallets.  “One of the things we've seen has been a serious growth in the use of wallets,” Kramer tells BAN. But while customers use digital wallets to pay for goods, what lags behind is bill payment. At a time when everyone lives on smartphones, bills still arrive via paper or, at best, email, he says. “We need to meet these consumers where they are now living, and taking that transaction — whether it was paper, whether it was a reminder, whether it was an email — and converting it to … a digital wallet interaction,” Kramer notes. Both Visa and Mastercard offer disbursement rails, but banks and merchants need to wholly embrace digital technology for this to happen, he tells BAN.  Find out why so many fintechs are entering the payments space and how FedNow’s real-time payments will fit into the big picture of automated payments in today’s podcast. 

Banks of all levels, from large global firms to credit unions and challenger banks, are expressing interest in modernizing their core, Temenos Americas President Jacqueline White tells Bank Automation News in this week’s episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  The reason varies, but core technology is aging, and with it the employees who can code in the older systems, White said. That’s pushing some financial institutions to move to newer, often cloud-based, solutions with less complexity, she added. “A lot of organizations are looking around and seeing that the only individuals who know how to code in their current system or know anything about the complexity and the customizations are retiring or leaving the organization,” White said. “At Temenos we call it the ‘legacy spaghetti.’ It's very complicated. It's tangled up, it's confusing.” Banks are also enticed by the advanced data analytics capabilities newer solutions can offer, she added. Financial services software provider Temenos is addressing the desire for more data through a partnership with cloud-based customer relationship management solution Salesforce. The offering will give “a deeper dimension into everything from bank employees that are sitting in the branch to those who are sitting in the call centers and opening accounts,” White said. Another data-driven play is Temenos’ May announcement that it’s piloting a virtual chief operating officer (COO) at the $28.7 billion Canadian Western Bank, White said. The artificial intelligence-driven tool helps small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) understand cash flow, White said.  “It's all automated,” White said. “It’s taking that data from the core and helping to make it intelligent and useful within the bank, because you have this tremendous amount of data and detail on users, what their needs are, how they operate.” The virtual COO, which will help the bank support SMBs with tailored lending options, will officially go live in January, she added.  Earlier this year, the Geneva, Switzerland-based bank launched the Temenos Banking Cloud, an ala carte solution that lets banks subscribe to banking services without a complete core upgrade.  Currently, it has more than 700 customers, White said.  “The idea of coming to a provider for a turnkey solution, again, from that back end, back-office core to the front end, digital experience in a hosted cloud environment is very appealing and very intriguing to our users,” White said. “It's being very well received and adopted.” North American FIs are flocking to Temenos for solutions. In the first half of the year, the provider signed $5 billion Wescom Credit Union and is in the process of signing the $8.6 billion Delta Community CU, the $1.8 billion Sharonview FCU and the $357.4 million Bank of Clarendon. In Canada, Temenos recently signed Saven Financial, a division of $3.9 billion FirstOntario, for a digital parallel bank to go live, and also signed on the $5.3 billion BlueShore Financial for additional products and SASCU to extend its partnership.  Globally, the software provider is signing the Egypt-based Alex Bank and extending its partnership with the $407.9 billion Standard Chartered, a  British multinational banking and financial services firm, to support its growing financing and securities services offering.  Temenos [OTCMKTS: TMSNY] shares were trading at $151.78 at 2:09 p.m., up 1.48% as of market open. 

Banks use robotic process automation (RPA) to merge back-end systems after acquisitions and are starting to automate more self-help for customers. That’s in addition to the more common use case of automating the creation of customer accounts, says Jesse McHargue, senior solutions engineer with RPA company Nintex, in this week’s episode of “The Buzz.” “I would also say that we are starting to see more automation efforts around self-help,” McHargue tells Bank Automation News. “Existing customers reach out to the bank for a variety of reasons,” he says, whether for disputes, basic requests or opening up new accounts. The Bellevue, Wash.-based Nintex started by offering an on-premises workflow augmentation solution for Microsoft product SharePoint. The company has grown by acquisition, most recently acquiring e-signature provider AssureSign in June and RPA tool Foxtrot by EnableSoft in 2019. Nintex clients include $9.65 billion Kuwait International Bank; $2.9 billion Alexandria, La.-based Red River Bank; $2.9 billion Queensland, Australia-based Auswide Bank; $1.5 billion Waco, Texas-based Extraco Banks; and $322.6 million Ashland, Ky.-based Ashland Credit Union. In this podcast, McHargue also shares best practices for RPA and automation, and discusses how banks can expand their use of automation. 

Bank Automation News sits down with the vendor’s new CIO, Sumit Johar, as well as Ken Mertzel, global head of financial services, to discuss how financial institutions can expand citizen development and the automation opportunities banks may be missing. 

In this episode of “The Buzz,” Bank Automation News speaks to Alok Prasad, CEO of startup CashRepublic, about using automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to help communities of color take advantage of banking services. CashRepublic serves the unbanked currently with two Florida locations where customers can cash checks, make wire transfers and other services. It plans to launch an app later this year. A recent FDIC survey showed that 5.4%, or 7.1 million U.S. households, are unbanked, meaning that no one surveyed in the household had a checking or savings account at a bank or credit union.  Most of the unbanked are African American or Latino customers, populations that have been disproportionally affected by COVID-19, Prasad said.  “We know that the pandemic has impacted these communities of color pretty strongly and you look at all the data whether it's death rate, you know, they tend to be 40% higher than other demographic,” Prasad said. “So, they have been hard hit both from the impact of the COVID, the healthcare inequalities that have been there, and also the financial inequalities.” Prasad contends that automation and AI can help serve the unbanked by lowering the cost of typical banking services. He explains in this podcast how Orlando-based CashRepublic plans to leverage the tech to reach those who feel disenfranchised by banks and credit unions. 

In this episode of “The Buzz,” Bank Automation News speaks with cybersecurity research analyst Micah Musser of Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technologies, and a co-author of the recent report, “Machine Learning and Cyber Security: Hype and Reality” about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in creating sophisticated attacks.  AI and ML could be leveraged to coordinate spear-phishing attacks that target specific people, or even to build malware that could navigate networks, to analyze what to infect as it goes, Musser tells BAN. However, “could” is the operative word there. There is much speculation as to how AI and ML could be used, but how can financial institutions separate the hype from reality?   Musser shares some of the ways AI and ML could potentially be used to both accomplish cyberattacks and heighten security. As it turns out, some of the techniques marketed by vendors as AI and ML have been around for 20 years. In this week’s podcast, Musser breaks down what is overhyped and what is not — and how financial institutions can separate marketing fiction from cybersecurity reality. 

Definitions, clarifications and other non-obligation material make up 65% of the information in regulations.That leaves a mere 35% that involves an actual obligation, according to reg-tech firm Ascent. That means banks and other regulated industries — and more specifically, their lawyers — spend hours combing through information in search of actionable items, according to Andrew Steioff, senior manager of technology alliances at governance, risk and compliance software vendor LogicGate. The company partners with Ascent to offer an AI-based GSR solution.In today’s episode of The Buzz, Steioff tells Bank Automation News: “Historically speaking, these organizations would have lawyers on staff that would sit there and manually comb through pages and pages and pages of these regulations, which a lot of them are ... just definitions. The real meat and potatoes aspect of it may only be a few lines for each individual regulation.”In this podcast, Steioff breaks down how the business case for ditching manual efforts in favor of AI-based solutions.

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 products for digital payments, in today’s episode of “The Buzz.”    In this Bank Automation News podcast, Kissner also discusses the due diligence that banks and other financial institutions should perform to minimize cybersecurity threats while working with third-party vendors.  

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” podcast, we learn how the FDIC’s Tech Lab (FDiTech) and Duke faculty and students will work together.   Listen as Jimmie Lenz, director, Master of Engineering in FinTech and Master of Engineering in Cybersecurity and Visiting Professor of Financial Economics at the Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University, discusses the arrangement with the FDIC and how the engineering school is facilitating those efforts. Lenz also explains the best ways to prevent and mitigate cyber risks at financial institutions in this Bank Automation News podcast.  

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 plays in serving military customers across the world. “It’s a highly mobile market that we serve,” Vickery tells BAN. “They don’t get a lot of say in the timing or the location of their whereabouts.”  While the bank is one of the largest installation banks in the country, it’s important to service members to access financial services when they are not near a branch. To that end, the bank has rolled out “Q2,” a new online banking platform that gives clients the ability to access their accounts on mobile devices and use features and functions like Zelle to easily move money around to family or friends at distant locations.  Vickery and Kientz explain here how the bank has automated to make loan applications available 24/7, and how it has added digital support for the Veteran Administration’s home loans.   

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 more quickly, he says. In this Bank Automation News podcast, Nagarsheth discusses getting buy-in and changing culture within an organization while determining the operations and functions to digitize. Learn more about “codesigning” automations for internal processes and customer-facing transactions, as well as working with third parties to manage digital transformations.  This podcast is presented as part of a content partnership between Bank Automation News and Kearney.   

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 banking applications to fintech and data services. These vulnerabilities can put data at risk of being stolen, and can also give attackers a gateway into backend systems, experts say. Gartner this week warned that businesses should take a three-pronged approach to securing APIs.  Find a discussion of these topics and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap with BAN Editor Myra Thomas and Associate Editor Loraine Lawson for the week ended July 23, 2021. 

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 face more inherent risk when onboarding young clientele because traditional single stream data sources used to validate know-your-customer (KYC) processes may not work for this group. Onboarding younger customers with little financial experience or credit can be a challenge, and it’s proving essential for financial institutions to facilitate onboarding with automation to gain this new generation of customers, Ma says in this Bank Automation News podcast.   Ma is working to deepen the fintech offerings and go-to-market strategy at Alloy, which he joined in January. He previously served as head of growth with corporate card fintech Ramp, and led the fintech and developer sales vertical at data integrator Plaid, where he built out the firm’s New York office prior to its $5.3 billion acquisition by Visa.  

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 activities in low-income communities, according to the FDIC. MDIs originate a greater share of mortgages to borrowers in low- and moderate-income areas and with larger shares of minority populations than non-MDIs.  In today’s episode of “The Buzz,” hear Bryan DeShasier, managing director of product and process at digital mortgage platform Promontory MortgagePath, discusses this lack to automation at these particular types of financial institutions. Promontory’s solution provides comprehensive fulfillment services and compliance support for them.  When technology is used at CDFIs and MDIs, it is often older, meaning that the lending process is fraught with lengthy manual processes and extended turn times for loans. Better automation means the lenders can scale up operations quickly, although many have few loan officers in place.  In this Bank Automation News podcast, DeShasier and Carrie Mumma, director, manager of client relationships at Promontory MortgagePath, address the opportunities and challenges of rolling out the fintech’s new initiative for CDFIs and MDIs and the value proposition automation offers.  While automation does speed loan closures, there remain hurdles to implementation that are similar among all banks. Changing the culture and habits of the employees of any financial institution can be difficult and does take time, said Mumma.   

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, BAN also delves into the rumors that Google is in talks to buy pring, a Tokyo-based cashless payment and settlement startup, and the significance of the transaction.Meanwhile, stablecoin issuer Circle’s bid to go public via a merger with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Concord Acquisition Corp. is a deal that values the firm at $4.5 billion. The BAN team discusses the acquisition that will have Circle shareholders owning 86% of the firm upon completion of the transaction, which is expected at yearend.Find a discussion of these topics and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap with Editor Myra Thomas and Associate Editors Jaspreet Kalra and Loraine Lawson for the week ended July 9, 2021.

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 intelligence and machine learning in the financial sector. While banks told federal agencies they have enough regulations, the Internet Association, which represents Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other internet titans, suggested the federal government issue guidance on AI explainability.  Find a discussion of these topics and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap with BAN Editor Myra Thomas and  Associate Editors Jaspreet Kalra and Loraine Lawson for the week ended July 2, 2021. 

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 discussion of these topics and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap with Editor Myra Thomas and Associate Editors Jaspreet Kalra and Loraine Lawson for the week ended June 18, 2021.

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 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Ecosystem at the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University in Canada.  For instance, “If we tell the [AI] model what the gender is, it can account for that difference and bias,” Thomas explains. “It's helpful for the model to be less biased — knowing what the gender is — because otherwise, due to historical, societal prejudices, an average woman might look worse than an average male for no reason other than that she's a woman.”    In today’s podcast, learn how ideas of fairness play into AI models and why what seems fair may be unfair to certain populations. Thomas also shares some best practices for creating ethical AI platforms. 

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 of artificial intelligence in the banking system has nothing to do with making credit decisions.” The BAN team also discusses here how banks are leveraging AI for credit scoring, particularly for those without credit, and the ethical issues that crop up with AI-driven decisioning.  Find a discussion of these topics and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap with Publisher JJ Hornblass, Editor Myra Thomas, Associate Editors Jaspreet Kalra and Loraine Lawson for the week ended June 4, 2021. 

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 diligence.

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 institutions can extract maximum value out of bot deployment.

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 and chief executive for at compliance automation company ClauseMatch.  “A bank might have clients in the U.S., but customer service in a different country, and offices in 60 other countries,” Likhoded says. “Then, separating that client data and making sure that no one can access it where they are not supposed to, technically, is going to be a challenge.” ClauseMatch’s client list includes the fintech Revolut and Barclays Bank, which has 90,000 staff members using the tool to automate compliance documents and policies.   Listen as Likhoded also discusses in this podcast the looming compliance issues presented by environmental, social and corporate governance (ESC) criteria, and artificial intelligence. 

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 before deploying bots.  Citi Ventures, Citibank’s venture investment arm and incubator, is setting its sights on process discovery investments in the coming year, Managing Director Matt Carbonara told BAN this week. In this podcast the BAN team discusses process discovery and how it fits into the broader practice of process mining.  Find a discussion of these topics and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap with Publisher JJ Hornblass, Editor Myra Thomas and Associate Editor Loraine Lawson for the week ended May 21, 2021. 

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 cropping up that involve combining RPA with advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. Banks are leveraging these tools to automate loan collections and fraud detection.Find a discussion of these topics and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap with Publisher JJ Hornblass and Associate Editors Jaspreet Kalra and Loraine Lawson for the week ended May 14, 2021.

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.

This week, Bank Automation News explored why banks lag behind other industries when it comes to automation, and also discussed rising losses due to digital payments fraud.  

One of the challenges with AI in financial services is explaining AI’s “black box,” which refers to the fact even developers are unable to provide visibility into an algorithm trained with machine learning (ML). This is one reason AI can include bias and run afoul of regulators.  Explainable AI could change that, said Stuart Tarmy, global director of financial services industry solutions at Aerospike. Aerospike offers a NoSQL, or non-tabular, non-relational database that powers real-time networks such as PayPal, Visa and Schwab. 

Bank Automation News this week looked at the maturation of digitization and automation trends while also exploring how low-code tools might be leveraged by financial institutions going forward. While robotic process automation (RPA) is having a moment in the sun, as seen by RPA vendor UiPath’s debut on public bourses this week, low-code tools and open-banking continue to gain traction.

In this podcast, LexisNexis Risk Solutions VP shares how banks can fight emerging cyber threats Automated bot cyberattacks are on the rise, while human-initiated attacks are down. Bot attacks increased by about 100 million last year, Kimberly Sutherland, vice president of fraud and identity strategy for data analytics company LexisNexis Risk Solutions, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of The Buzz. Human-initiated attacks, by comparison, were down by about 200 million, she said.  

This week, Bank Automation News drilled down on filings with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, examining what banks and vendors have said about the potential for new regulations on artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies. Both banks and vendors agreed that more clarification on regulations is necessary to adoption, particularly for small banks that might be looking to leverage third-party providers. In other news, the BAN team highlighted Envestnet’s acquisition of automated savings tool Harvest Savings & Wealth Management and explored the industry trend to give customers more personalized financial advice.  Find this and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap, featuring Publisher JJ Hornblass and Associate Editors Jaspreet Kalra and Loraine Lawson. 

Temenos President Jacqueline White shares lessons learned from digital banks Legacy systems are holding banks back, but AI can help  Consumers are looking for a frictionless customer service experience, but legacy systems may be getting in the way. 

Automating end-to-end process can be a big bite to chew off. This week, Bank Automation News explored best practice conversations with leaders at Wells Fargo and Ally, who think of automation in smaller pieces — individual building blocks, like Legos, that when put together can create something larger and more significant. 

 In this podcast, Signavio SVP Alex Day identifies four key steps banks should take when it comes to processes, automation and process mining. 

This week, Bank Automation News digs into how APIs support integration and strategic automation on the heels of UiPath’s announcement of its $40.5 million acquisition of API vendor Cloud Elements. Also this week, the BAN team discussed security challenges at credit unions and the sharp increase expected in regulation technology spending, which is predicted to exceed $130 billion by 2025. 

 Automation is moving up from the back office to the front office, where banks are increasingly using automation to sell and interact with customers. The challenge will be to ensure those encounters feel personal, says David Foss, chief executive of financial services at core provider Jack Henry, in this episode of The Buzz podcast. 

This week, Bank Automation News explored the state of automation in mortgage lending and the three stages of intelligent automation, which combines robot process automation (RPA) with artificial intelligence (AI). 

Legacy systems are one of the financial industry’s top three barriers to automation. That’s why digital banks, which are unencumbered by legacy applications, are often able to do what larger banks can’t — and at a faster pace. In this podcast, Charlie Newark French, chief operating officer for the automation fintech Hyperscience, discusses with Bank Automation News the three main barriers that banks face, but that neobanks do not. He also discusses key performance indicators for automation.

This week, Bank Automation News saw a flurry of funding rounds for automation-related fintechs, including a $220 million Series F round for the intelligent automation company WorkFusion. The New York-based WorkFusion uses artificial intelligence (AI) and robots to automate document-heavy processes in highly regulated industries. The company plans to use the funds to explore further into cloud-based automation, AI and no-code solutions, CEO Alex Lyashok told BAN. 

Corporate banks will strive to become “platform players” in the next four years, a shift that will fundamentally driven by automation.  A platform player is a bank that offers a full ecosystem of third-party products and services to clients, one of three paths most commercial banks will pursue, according to Tim Tyler, a senior principal in solutions consulting with financial software provider Finastra.

This week, Bank Automation News explored the intersection of automation and artificial intelligence, diving into the opportunities and challenges they present. BAN spoke with Bank of America’s newly appointed head of digital to discuss the calculus behind prioritization and how AI and automation, in the form of virtual assistant Erica, are driving customer engagement. 

In this podcast, David McLaughlin, CEO and founder of anti-fraud vendor QuantaVerse, discusses the conflicts chief risk and compliance officers face daily, how to automate fraud investigation, and whether automation helps or hinders the fight against fraud and money-laundering. 

This week Bank Automation News took an inside look at automation strategy at the $1.96 trillion Wells Fargo, which has thousands of attended bots and hundreds of unattended bots that save the bank millions of hours on an annual basis.  

This week Bank Automation News explored the biggest risk and security threats in banking, and how some financial institutions are leveraging automated technology to strengthen risk management programs. 

The most common mistake banks make is using technology without auditing or understanding it, according to Andrew Stines, chief risk officer at the $1.77 billion Coastal Community Bank in Everett, Wash.  In this podcast, Stines, the former chief risk officer at Sunwest Bank, where he rebuilt the bank’s regulatory program, as well as an attorney, explains how banks can find themselves in trouble with regulators and the caveats for ensuring risk-free automated systems. 

Anti-money laundering and fraud solution provider Nice Actimize announced a new artificial intelligence-driven tool Thursday that it claims will reduce false positives when conducting anti-money laundering (AML) screening on potential customers.  

This week, Bank Automation News unveils its newest cohort of startups that bring global talent and ideas to Fintech Discovery, the publication’s marketing accelerator, along with an overview of the cohort’s five companies and the value proposition they bring to the financial services sector. This week BAN also spoke with Jason Park, president of U.S. Bank Housing Capital Company, about the new automated solution that allows the bank to manage construction loans.

When COVID-19 hit, Sunrise Banks shifted to a remote environment within 48 hours and it quickly became clear that manual processes weren’t going to work anymore, said Sunrise CIO Brett Cooksey. Cooksey came to the $1.2 billion Minneapolis, Minn.-based bank from C.H. Robinson, the supply chain management and logistics solution provider, which has a culture that is 80% to 90% digital, he said. At Sunrise, he faced a pre-pandemic culture that favored manual, paper-based process over digitalization.

This week Bank Automation News delved into the growing trend of leveraging AI-based tools to strengthen personal financial management. RBC outlined development plans for its virtual assistant NOMI, and CIBC partnered with MX to proactively and automatically offer customers tailored recommendations based on analyses of financial and transactional data. Meanwhile, BAN spoke with Sunrise Banks CIO Brett Cooksey to learn how the community bank carved out a tech budget to form its automation “strike team.” Find this and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap, featuring Bianca Chan and Loraine Lawson for the week ending Feb. 5, 2021, along with what’s on the horizon for next week.

Attended automation and digital assistants for employees are among the hottest robotic process automation (RPA) trends for the next few years. Bank Automation News recently interviewed Automation Anywhere experts Ken Mertzel, global industry leader of financial services, and Catherine Calarco, senior director and head of global go-to-market, about the use cases they’re seeing and their predictions for RPA. 

This week, Bank Automation News explored Wells Fargo’s goal to stand up at least 300 automations in the next few years as it looks to expand its robotic processing automation (RPA) team. After making headlines for losing a $5.3 billion deal for acquisition by Visa, data aggregator Plaid unveiled a new beta product this week called “Deposit Switch,” which automates bank direct deposit funding and account switching. Meanwhile, Mastercard has developed a free tool aimed at curbing fraud among SMBs. In this episode of The Buzz, JJ Hornblass, Bianca Chan and Loraine Lawson discuss this news and more for the week ended Jan. 29, and look at what’s in store for next week.

This week Bank Automation News launched as a new brand, replacing Bank Innovation. What’s the behind-the-scenes reasoning for the move? During this video podcast, editors JJ Hornblass, Bianca Chan and Loraine Lawson discuss the impetus behind the pivot to BAN, and share insider info as to what readers can expect as we move forward to bring you the latest automation news in the financial sector. Meanwhile, the second round of the Paycheck Protection Program drove industry partnerships between fintechs and financial institutions in a move that pushed automation agendas forward.

This week investors funneled nearly $1 billion to fintechs MX, Blend, Rho Technologies and Rapyd, some of which are teeing up automation initiatives with an eye toward data management. Meanwhile, Temenos reported it is exploring the addition of automated responses for its Engage platform, and Kasisto is working with NCR to bring chatbot technology to smaller financial institutions. Find this and more in today’s edition of the Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass, Bianca Chan and Garret Reich for the week ending Jan. 15, 2020.

This week, Green Dot unveiled GO2bank, its second digital-only bank, the same week BBVA USA announced it was shuttering its neobank, Simple, according to published reports. Green Dot, which has bolstered its app with existing and new automated features, faces an uphill battle as it enters the crowded challenger bank field. Meanwhile, Chase’s automated savings tool is gaining traction, and total amounts saved through the tool have now tripled 2019 figures. Find this and more in today’s edition of the Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass and Bianca Chan for the week ending Jan. 8, 2020.

This week, Canadian banks CIBC and TD made strides with AI and automation technology. CIBC teamed up with IBM to launch its first virtual assistant, and TD leaned into automation for its cybersecurity efforts and introduced a slate of new AI products. Meanwhile, Bank Innovation’s sister venture INV Fintech launched a new platform designed to support the discovery process of banks’ innovation pipelines. Find this and more in today’s edition of the Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass and Bianca Chan for the week ending Dec. 18, 2020.

This week, Bank Innovation dove into data that shows inefficient business processes are pushing bank employees to want to quit. Meanwhile, another data set showed banks are planning to boost the budget for robotic process automation (RPA) endeavors. And finally, new technology from a Tel Aviv-based fintech is automating the know your customer (KYC) and onboarding process through a partnership with Finastra. Find this and more in today’s edition of the Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass and Bianca Chan for the week ending Dec. 11, 2020.

This week, Bank Innovation sat down with Truist CIO Scott Case to discuss his efforts during the merger of BB&T and SunTrust. “As we’re working through the merger, we’re taking the opportunity to modernize as we go, wherever we can,” Case said. Meanwhile, banks all over North America are coming up with new ways to take in customer feedback and improve their mobile apps. Find this and more in today’s edition of the Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass, Bianca Chan and Rick Morgan for the week ending Dec. 4, 2020.

Amazon Web Services scored big when Standard Chartered selected the Amazon.com subsidiary as a main cloud provider for its core and digital banking systems. The $754 billion bank is anticipating a 20% reduction in technology infrastructure costs by 2025, and is strengthening its fault tolerance by leveraging multiple cloud providers — SC inked a deal with Microsoft Azure in August — and geographically decentralizing regions and availability zones. Meanwhile, N26 is eyeing a credit card for its U.S. operations, according to CFO Maximilian Tayenthal. But the Berlin-based digital bank will face stiff competition if it moves forward with that plan. There’s no shortage of credit products in the U.S. among incumbent banks, let alone challengers like Chime, SoFi and MoneyLion, which already offer credit products. Find this and more in today’s edition of the Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass and Bianca Chan for the week ending Nov. 20, 2020.

This week marked the first-ever Banking Automation Summit, which featured speakers from PNC, Wells Fargo, Truist, Citi and other financial institutions. The conference touched on topics like lending automation, KYC and AML processes, and optical character recognition. The Bank Innovation team touches on the key takeaways from the event in today's edition of the Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass, Bianca Chan and Rick Morgan for the week ending Nov. 13, 2020.

While election officials continue to count votes in key battleground states, Bank Innovation editors revisited the 2020 election implications on fintech issues like bank charters, open banking and public credit reporting. This week also saw new numbers from Zelle and Venmo, with the two payments networks reporting third-quarter volume of $84 billion and $44 billion, respectively. Find this and more in today’s edition of the Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass, Bianca Chan and Rick Morgan for the week ending Nov. 6, 2020.

Bank Innovation sat down this week with Christian Kitchell, Bank of America’s head of AI solutions who also leads Erica. “Ultimately, what we want to do is be able to get to a universe of one, which is to say, every client will have a unique experience based on their situation, their needs, their relationship with us,” he said. Startups, meanwhile, are targeting customer relations management and consulting functions with artificial intelligence. Ahead of Banking Automation Summit on Nov. 9-10, Bank Innovation editors spoke about the role of automation in financial services and gave a preview to some of the topics to be discussed at the summit. Find this and more in today’s edition of the Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass, Bianca Chan and Rick Morgan for the week ending Oct. 30, 2020.

This week, Bank Innovation sat down with Don Cardinal, managing director of the Financial Data Exchange, to talk about the adoption of API-based data sharing. One way to get more small and mid-size banks to adopt API-based data sharing, according to Cardinal, is to get more core providers using the technology standard. Banks like Regions and Umpqua, meanwhile, are moving ahead with new technology initiatives. Find this and more in today’s edition of the Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass, Bianca Chan and Rick Morgan for the week ending Oct. 23, 2020.

Third-quarter earnings kicked off this week and, despite the acceleration in digital banking in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, year-over-year adoption of mobile and digital was relatively flat. Bank of America’s CashPro platform — used by businesses to manage payments, invest and receive funds — gained digital traction, with CashPro mobile app logins jumping 54% YoY and online users across commercial, corporate and business banking reaching 500,000. The Charlotte, N.C.-based bank added three new APIs to the platform last week, bringing the platform's offering to more than 50 APIs. Meanwhile, Chase’s new partnership with Greenlight highlighted the fintech’s move into the B2B market and Chase’s renewed interest in age-segmented banking products. Find this and more in today’s edition of the Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass and Bianca Chan for the week ending Oct. 16, 2020.

Sibos 2020 took place this week in a digital format. During a conference on robotic process automation, industry leaders discussed both the challenges and the opportunities of this technology. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, meanwhile, is trying to get charters into the hands of fintechs through a proposed payments charter. “There’s at least an acknowledgment among some of the members of Congress that there’s a real problem this is trying to solve,” said Brian Knight, director of innovation and governance at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Find this and more in today’s edition of the Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass, Bianca Chan and Rick Morgan for the week ending Oct. 9, 2020.

Affirm is pushing further into new loans after an initial pullback during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We feel there is in fact a broader product fit for e-commerce-based, point-of-sale lending across the entire consumer segment than what we used to see pre-COVID,” said Sandeep Bhandari, chief strategy and risk officer at Affirm. Fintechs like Nova Credit and CredoLab, meanwhile, are using new technology to reach underbanked consumers. Find this and more in today’s edition of the Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass, Bianca Chan and Rick Morgan for the week ending Oct. 2, 2020.

Contactless payments are here to stay in the post-COVID world, according to recent data from Amex, but cash’s staying power may hinder banks from fully realizing the efficiencies of digitized payments. Meanwhile, Bank of America filed a record 415 patent applications during the first half of 2020, with a clear focus on AI and machine learning, security and programming technology. Also this week, Bank Innovation launched FI Innovation Rankings, with data from FI Navigator, which ranks the 25 most innovative financial institutions across various asset sizes. Truist takes first place among institutions with more than $100 billion of assets. Find this and more in today’s edition of the Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass and Bianca Chan for the week ending Sept. 25, 2020.

It seems consumers need bank branches less than before. A Plaid study showed 80% of consumers now say they can bank without a branch. Banks like Citibank and Silicon Valley Bank, meanwhile, are launching new platforms out of internal incubators. “We have seen from the research we have done with our clients and investor partners that there is tremendous value in us developing new solutions and new businesses to meet their top needs,” said Melody Dippold, managing director and head of innovation at Silicon Valley Bank. Find this and more in today’s edition the Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass and Rick Morgan for the week ending Sept. 18, 2020.

Banking and fintech leaders came together for the fully virtual Bank Innovation Build this week. The conference featured speakers from Wells Fargo, Ally, TD and more, as well as a fireside chat with Vanessa Colella, chief innovation officer at Citi and head of Citi Ventures. Discussions revealed that banks and fintechs alike are not slowing down their innovation operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this edition of the Weekly Wrap, Bank Innovation editors Bianca Chan and Rick Morgan discuss the major takeaways from Build with Royal Media CEO and BI Executive Editor JJ Hornblass.

Some of the biggest banks in North America are integrating accounting into their online banking platforms for small businesses. It’s a strategy that eliminates manual data entry for small business clients and helps the bank own more of the client relationship. Bank Innovation also spoke with JPMorgan Chase CIO Rohan Amin this week. “Artificial intelligence, quantum computing and machine learning will radically improve the way we can analyze data to make better business decisions and deliver contextually relevant insights to our customers,” Amin said. Find this and more in today’s edition the Weekly Wrap, featuring Bianca Chan, Rick Morgan and Youmna Hobeiche, chief growth officer at Troc Circle, for the week ending Sept. 4, 2020.

Weekly Wrap: Credit card customer satisfaction falls, and tech jobs move inland Bank Innovation EditorsAugust 28, 2020 Customer Experience, Payments, Premium, Video Image via Pixabay Customer satisfaction with credit card issuers has dropped since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic due to card terms and a lack of communication, according to a report from J.D. Power. Tech jobs, meanwhile, are popping up outside of traditional hotspots like Silicon Valley and New York. A report from Mendix indicated counties in New Jersey and South Dakota had the biggest gap between developer jobs and available talent. Find this and more in today’s edition The Weekly Wrap, featuring Bianca Chan, Rick Morgan and Michael Seaman, CEO and co-founder of SwipeSum, for the week ending Aug. 28, 2020.

More than 70% of executives predicted that spending on banking innovation will increase in the next two years and that the industry is poised for growth, according to a recent INV Fintech survey. Many financial institutions will be looking for fintech partnerships to accelerate that development, with 76% reporting that they will seek out more partnerships with fintechs in the same timeframe. Meanwhile, the Bank Innovation team dug into the depths of the regulatory labyrinth that is Dodd-Frank to look at the state of open banking in the U.S. and how the promise of an open financial services infrastructure is influencing banks’ innovation strategies. Find this and more in today’s edition The Weekly Wrap, featuring Bianca Chan, JJ Hornblass and Jon Dobson, chief executive of PayRecs, for the week ending Aug. 21, 2020.

American Express and Kabbage made headlines this week with reports the card company is looking to acquire the fintech for $850 million. Industry thinkers point out Kabbage could provide AmEx with a strong technology platform and the ability to reach new clients. Big banks, meanwhile, spoke with Bank Innovation about the spikes in mobile adoption they are seeing since the pandemic began. Find this and more in today’s edition of The Weekly Wrap, featuring Rick Morgan and Jeffrey Tower, vice president of marketing and business development at ChargeAfter, for the week ending Aug. 14, 2020.

Fintech funding rebounded during the second quarter. According to a report from CB Insights, funding increased 17% quarter over quarter to $9.3 billion from $7.9 billion in the first quarter. Fintech lenders, meanwhile, are trying to gain deeper customer relationships with bank accounts, while big banks are working to make their voice chatbots conversational. Find this and more in today’s edition of The Weekly Wrap, featuring Bianca Chan, Rick Morgan and Arcady Lapiro, founder and CEO of Agora Services, for the week ending Aug. 7, 2020.

Varo Money officially announced today it is shedding the “banking startup” title, as the company has finally received its banking charter after a three-year journey. Whether more fintechs will follow suit remains to be seen. “A banking charter comes with capital requirements and regulatory oversight that will not be appealing to all fintechs,” said Julie Hill, a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law who focuses on banking and commercial law. Startups Remitly and TransferWise, meanwhile, scored big funding rounds and boosted their valuations. Find this and more in today’s edition of The Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass, Bianca Chan, Rick Morgan and Patrick Kandianis, CEO and co-founder of Quatromoney, for the week ending July 31, 2020.

Banks may be losing their edge when it comes to CX, at least according to a new report from Sitel Group. “While the retail industry quickly implemented practical online solutions such as click and collect to meet changing customer needs, banking and financial services fell behind,” Sitel Group said in a financial services industry snapshot of the report. U.S. Bank, meanwhile, reported during its second-quarter earnings that 77% of its customers are using digital channels. Bank Innovation also sat down this week with Chris Tremont, executive vice president of virtual banking at Radius Bank, to discuss the bank’s technology roadmap. Find this and more in today’s edition of The Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass and Rick Morgan, for the week ending July 24, 2020.

Credit unions are rejecting some of the big core providers and instead choosing startups to overhaul their technology. Royal Oak, Mich.-based banking software company Bankjoy has grown its customer base by 50% since the start of the pandemic. Point-of-sale lending, meanwhile, is continuing its rapid growth trajectory. Afterpay announced it is launching in-store capabilities this week, while Visa also made a move into the space, and MoneyLion announced plans to do the same. Find this and more in today’s edition of The Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass, Bianca Chan, Rick Morgan and Johan Envall, vice president of sales and business development at COVR Security, for the week ending July 17, 2020.

Zelle is moving beyond peer-to-peer and pushing into business-to-consumer territory. “Not only we, at Wells Fargo, but Early Warning and its network banks have seen a significant increase in businesses using disbursements with Zelle,” said Michelle Ziolkowski, head of global payables in treasury management at Wells Fargo. Big banks, meanwhile, are adopting fusion centers to enlist different departments to work together to fight cybersecurity threats. Finally, INV Fintech startup gravityAI has launched out of private beta, and its two-sided marketplace for algorithms is "open for business." Find this and more in today’s edition of The Weekly Wrap, featuring JJ Hornblass, Bianca Chan, Rick Morgan and gravityAI founder Daniel Huss, for the week ending July 10, 2020.

This week, Bank Innovation took a look a Verint report that ranked some of the country's biggest banks based on their crisis customer experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. Smaller banks, meanwhile, are pursuing standalone brands despite the fact that bigger banks have stumbled with their own digital offshoots. In startup news, Upgrade plans to move beyond its credit products by launching bank accounts sometime this quarter. The company received a $40 million from Santander InnoVentures this week and hit $1 billion in valuation.

In this episode, Bank Innovation sits down with Imran Khan, the head of global digital experience at TD, to talk about the bank's personalization efforts. Khan discusses how TD uses emerging technology to foster relationship banking in the digital age.

The Bank Innovation team sits down and discusses major news from the past week and what to look for in the week ahead.

The Bank Innovation team sits down and discusses major news from the past week and what to look for in the week ahead.

The Bank Innovation team sits down and discusses major news from the past week and what to look for in the week ahead.

The Bank Innovation team sits down and discusses major news from the past week and what to look for in the week ahead.

The Bank Innovation and INV Fintech teams sit down and discuss major news from the past week and what to look for in the week ahead.

The Bank Innovation and INV Fintech teams sit down and discuss major news from the past week and what to look for in the week ahead.

The Bank Innovation and INV Fintech teams sit down and discusses major news from the past week and what to look for in the week ahead.

At the helm of Fifth Third’s digital strategy, Melissa Stevens is focused on delivering suggestions based on customer needs and preferences. Now, the 160-year-old bank is zeroed in on data-driven customer experiences. In this episode of “Fintech Unfiltered,” Stevens speaks with Bank Innovation about how Fifth Third focuses on customers' needs instead of competing with the biggest banks.

One week after the Small Business Administration launched its Paycheck Protection Program, banks and fintechs alike are still navigating best practices to get funding into the hands of small business clients. As COVID-19 continues to rattle the economy, startups are launching new products and features to engage customers. The week’s news wasn’t confined to coronavirus-related coverage. On Tuesday, SoFi announced it was acquiring Galileo for $1.2 billion, a move that could turn some of SoFi’s competitors into clients.

Bank Innovation's end-of-week update with breaking news and key trends.

Bank Innovation's end-of-week update with breaking news and key trends.

Bank Innovation's end-of-week update with breaking news and key trends.

Bank Innovation's end-of-week update with breaking news and key trends.

Bank Innovation's end-of-week update with breaking news and key trends.

In this new episode of “Fintech Unfiltered,” Bank Innovation sat down with Kelly Ford, who was recently named new general partner at Edison Partners, to discuss the challenger banks and platforms in which the firm has invested, and why. 

Bank Innovation's end-of-week update with breaking news and key trends.

Bank Innovation's end-of-week update with breaking news and key trends.

Bank Innovation's end-of-week update with breaking news and key trends.

Bank Innovation's end-of-week update with breaking news and key trends.

Royal Media CEO JJ Hornblass hosted an event in the company’s Manhattan office to discuss Citi Ventures, and D10x, incubates new concepts and ideas.

In this episode of Fintech Unfiltered, Bank Innovation sat down with BMO Financial Group‘s Ben Schack to discuss the mutually beneficial partnerships between BMO and startups. 

Bank Innovation's end-of-week update with breaking news and key trends.

Bank Innovation's end-of-week update with breaking news and key trends.

Bank Innovation's end-of-week update with breaking news and key trends.

In this episode of Fintech Unfiltered, we sit down with OnDeck CEO Noah Breslow to talk about the small business lending company's goal of becoming a full-service bank. Breslow touches on the company's vision of a 'mom and pop' bank of the future, what steps the company is taking to get a bank charter and some of the challenges involved in the process.

Bank Innovation's end-of-week update with breaking news and key trends.

On this episode of Fintech Unfiltered, sponsored by Blend, we spoke to Unconventional Ventures founder Theodora Lau on the lack of diversity in fintech and startups. She argues that better representation leads to better innovation for new products and services.

On this episode of Fintech Unfiltered, sponsored by Q2 {open}, we spoke to Digit founder and CEO Ethan Bloch on Digit's next steps and the future of personal finance. Bloch emphasized the goal is not to replace the bank but to help customers manage their money better through automation. This is an excerpt from a phone interview.

August de los Reyes, Varo's new chief design officer, brings a resume that includes head of design at Xbox, head of design at Pinterest and director of user experience at Google. We sat down with de los Reyes to learn more about his future plans for the banking startup's design.

Credit Sesame, which raised $43 million last week, provides free credit scores and insights into how to improve those scores. The company also suggests loans and credit cards that could help. We interviewed Credit Sesame CEO Adrian Nazari for a story this week. This is an excerpt from that phone interview.

In this episode of Fintech Unfiltered, we sit down with Stephen Corliss, CEO of the social investment startup Huddl. Corliss climbed to senior management positions at big financial firms like UBS and Blackrock before pivoting into the startup world. Bank Innovation talked to Corliss about the transition and what he brings to the table coming from big finance. 

The key benefit of using programming language Scala to build a digital platform is a feature called Type Safety, which allows for better and faster testing because it allows detecting "errors while writing the code," before running it, according to Jason Brown, CEO and co-founder of fintech Tally. In this latest episode of Fintech Unfiltered podcast, Brown explained that Scala is an important, but underrated, layer to develop a cloud-based platform for financial services because of its ability to allow for "faster and better," testing, efficient code compiling and scalability. This "modern programming language," is designed to work within the Java script ecosystem, and although it is not meant to replace Java, it can enhance many features of programming and coding including accuracy and testing, he said.

The volatile markets in 2018 were hard for many investors to grasp. Gal Krubiner, CEO of Pagaya, discusses how his algorithms looked at the year that was and the year ahead on behalf of the company's institutional clients. Krubiner still spends much of his time evangelizing how AI is a better way for managing fixed income assets. How will the wealth management space handle the disruption heading its ways? And where will the smart money be in 2019? Listen to Krubiner's take here.

In this latest episode of Fintech Unfiltered, the podcast from Bank Innovation and its sister accelerator INV Fintech, newly appointment Financial Data Exchange managing director Don Cardinal talks about the group’s mission to set standards for data sharing and where it’s going to focus its attention, which includes the areas of data semantics and secure authentication.

In the five years since payments company PayPal acquired Braintree, a comprehensive payment platform, it has seen a 54% YOY growth, according to Juan Benitez, general manager at Braintree. In 2019, Braintree wants to maintain that momentum but will also be undertaking three key innovation initiatives. In this latest episode of Fintech Unfiltered, Benitez explains those three areas of focus and much more.

In this latest episode of Fintech Unfiltered, Jeremy Balkin, the head of innovation at HSBC Bank USA talks to Bank Innovation about HSBC’s lofty innovation strategy for 2018, including everything from system upgrades to installing a real robot in the bank branch. Listen to Balkin talk about all this as well as HSBC’s other innovation milestones in 2018, what’s on the roadmap for 2019 as well as what the future of banking will look like, in his opinion.

JPMorgan Chase leads the U.S. in mobile banking with 32 million mobile banking users, the most for any U.S. bank. So why build Finn, an entirely new digital bank? Melissa Feldsher, managing director at JPMorgan Chase and head of Finn, discusses why (and how) the new bank was built, in this episode of Fintech Unfiltered.

In this latest episode of Fintech Unfiltered, N26 USA CEO Nicolas Kopp talks about what goes into setting up a challenger bank in the U.S., why he thinks the U.S. market is ready for a mobile-first bank and why N26 USA decided against a banking license in the U.S.A., the opposite decision it made in Europe.

Payment platform Dwolla's head of strategic projects, Jordan Lampe, talks about realtime payments in this episode of Fintech Unfiltered podcast. Lampe explains how banks can use this transactional data to tailor exiting products and services, but also create new ones based on the realtime information exchange taking place during the transaction.

This month's edition of INV Unfiltered features fintech expert Chris Skinner, who is speaking about the global impact of Chinese digital payment companies like Alipay.

Secil Watson, executive vice president and head of wholesale internet solutions at Wells Fargo, talks about the bank's API strategy, which allows Wells Fargo to serve customers in environments outside the bank walls. Opened in 2016, Wells's API gateway allows customers and partners to access bank services and data, within strictly secure parameters, naturally. This allows both Wells Fargo to offer additional services, as well as serve customers that want to access their accounts from within third-party solutions.

Many banks say, "We're really a technology company," but Green Dot is an actual tech company that bought a bank, and its banking-as-a-service philosophy proves it. On this podcast, Green Dot Chief Revenue Officer Brett Narlinger says his bank is building solutions to be embedded in apps that don't even exist yet. And Green Dot is not worried about being a "dumb pipe" -- Narlinger said the bank doesn't insist on its brand being in the forefront of all the services it provides. Green Dot has several high-profile partnerships, such as GoBank account for Uber drivers with realtime payouts, and the bank is built to deploy more such innovations. "If we weren't doing things with the icons of the [tech] industry, I'd be very nervous," Narlinger said. He also discusses how P2P's popularity may organically lead to more mobile payments volume at the point of sale.

Artificial intelligence is not just a buzzword — it is already operating in banking, even if customers don’t recognize it. From chatbots giving budgeting tips to fraud monitoring systems noticing anomalous activity on your debit card, AI is all around us in financial services, and it’s getting better and smarter. Raghu Rajah, VP of digital banking — engineering & product management at NCR’s Digital Insight unit, has been on the forefront of AI for years. He joined INV Unfiltered to tell us where he sees the industry now, and where it is headed. Rajah notes that while AI will make some jobs redundant, it will create many more new jobs, and enhance existing jobs.

If you're not sure what an ICO is, well, join the club -- but you're in the right place. Margaux Avedisian of Transform Group explains it all for you. She is in the business of getting attention to initial coin offerings and token sales, and has been steeped in bitcoin longer than the Winklevii. Avedisian discusses the pitfalls many companies face in the ICO world, which can even include going to jail for securities fraud (yikes!) But she also discusses the transformative potential ICOs have to deliver value to companies that might otherwise have a hard time even securing a bank account. She also talks about a new opportunity called a pre-ICO pool for accredited investors and select ICOs. How do you get in on that? If you're in this space at all and you don't know Margaux yet, c'mon, man. (Ok, she gives her email address at the end.)

How does a global payments company view startups, the various mobile payment platforms, and blockchain? Debbie Barta, Mastercard’s senior vice president of innovation, intrapreneurship, and partnerships, takes on these questions in the latest episode of INV Unfiltered. Barta is responsible for managing Mastercard Labs’s global network of startup competitions, as well as its developer portal and APIs. In this episode, she also describes the challenges in securing customer payment data in the post-Equifax-breach world, and in the emerging Internet of Things. Barta has been at Mastercard since 2007 in a variety of capacities including fraud management and startup engagement, and has degrees from Washington University, Webster University, and Stanford.

Two distinct streams have surfaced in fintech: passive and active investment. Betterment is the posterchild for passive investment, just recently booking $70 million of venture funding and has continued to enhance its services bankinnovation.net/2017/07/betterm…he-human-touch/. But the active investment strategy for investors is long from dead in fintech. We talked with Pierce Crosby of StockTwits, which is firmly in the active camp, about trends in investment fintech, as well as StockTwits’s future plans. Crosby has been with StockTwits since 2014, where he runs partnerships and business development. He is also an INV Fintech mentor. Previously, he was the Head of Research for Reuters.

On this episode JJ chats with Benjamin Savage the co-founder of Clocktower Technology Ventures and Managing Director at Drobny Capital. At Drobny Ben spearheads new business initiatives across the firm and is responsible for private market activities, including leadership of Clocktower’s investments. Ben was previously Director, Investment Associate Program for Bridgewater Associates, where he worked with the firm’s CIOs on strategic priorities, talent development and research. Ben began his career as a venture capital and private equity investor with Wasserstein Perella, and also co-founded Artivest and Waterfall Mobile. Ben holds a BA in philosophy from Yale University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

APIS and open banking – however that term is defined – are set to transform financial services by empowering consumers to share data with third parties. This means new businesses will develop that will orbit banks, and the consumer experience may be forever changed. Furthermore, APIs allow banks a measure of control and security screen-scraping did not – so why aren’t more banks embracing this new reality? Silicon Valley Bank is, and Head of APIs and Open Banking, Dan Kimerling explains how his bank is doing things today. Kimerling founded two startups, and now works at a bank and co-runs a venture capital firm, so it’s not an exaggeration to see he’s done it all and seen just about everything there is to see in fintech. He also shared some views on blockchain and mobile payments in this episode.

Talk about financial innovation has centered around millennials for years now -- so much so that Ron Shevlin, the industry consultant, recently called Baby Boomers the "emerging" sector in fintech. That sector of people older than 50 now numbers 111 million -- and rapidly growing -- in America today. Older people have different, more-complex digital needs than millennials. Additionally, often those needs touch on their children, as well. To what degree is fintech addressing these needs? Which startups are targeting this untapped fintech market? Does fintech need to adjust to serve older people, just as banking needs to adjust to serve millennials? These are some of the questions we pose to Theodora Lau, Director, Market Innovation at AARP, the giant not-for-profit for older Americans. In this engaging episode, Lau offers a fascinating tour of the “other” fintech.

How does a super-regional bank go about its innovation? In this episode of INV Unfiltered, Fazir Ali, Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy & Innovation at KeyBank, shares his bank’s “journey” to digital-first orientation. KeyBank, which has nearly 19,000 employees, has reconstituted its digital operations since 2013, when Ali joined the bank, and continues to push hard on innovation to help Key become “the nation’s best super-regional bank.” That push has led to some tough decisions, such as killing its PFM service in favor of other technology deliverables. Ali explains why Key did so, as well as offers a peek at what innovation is to come at the $137 billion-asset bank.

Finding customers quickly has become an overwhelming challenge for fintech startups. At the start of the fintech revolution, startups could mine social media to create customer relationships with an ever-expanding group of disaffected banking consumers. But competition -- from banks, as well -- has made that strategy more challenging. The new method of securing a customer base, ever-important in the fundraising game, is to find large corporates that offer large swaths of potential customers, without the hand-to-hand marketing combat of direct-to-consumer retail. In this podcast, we explore the B2B2C model of customer acquisition with Mark Zmarzly, founder of startup Hip Pocket, who is using B2B2C to catapult the company’s newly launched Hip Money app.

This inaugural episode of INV Unfiltered features Leo Cherman, head of Banco Sofisa Direto, the direct bank of Sao Paulo, Brazil-based Banco Sofisa, which is a FI partner to INV Fintech. Leo brings a unique perspective to us today, because he is both enmeshed in the Brazilian market, but also keenly in tune with global fintech.