This added stress, including to AI systems, can expose gaps in data quality, Mark Blake, financial services industry practice lead at data management solution provider Stibo Systems, tells FinAi News on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

Those gaps to watch for in AI systems include: 

• Mismatched data; 
• Missing data; 
• Lineage issues; and 
• Auditability issues. 

Financial institutions must ensure “they’re meeting and satisfying the regulators, and they need to be confident that their AI models also stand up to that pressure,” Blake says. 

Listen as Blake discusses AI readiness at financial institutions this tax season.

"The role of cloud has now become an enabler for AI across financial services,” Khokar says.  

For example, banks are tapping their cloud providers to host agents, creating processes that are “a little bit more intentional for managing risk, compliance, explainability,” he says. 

Netherlands-based bank ABN AMRO tapped Microsoft and Capgemini to migrate its existing chatbot to the cloud, according to Capgemini’s ” “World Report Series 2026: Cloud in Financial Services.” The bank migrated its chatbot infrastructure to Microsoft Copilot Studio to create an agent that integrates generative AI features and scalability. 

Before moving it to the cloud, the chatbot had high customer drop-off rates, limited capabilities and high operating costs, according to the report. Now, the agent’s language processing accuracy in Dutch has increased by 7% and overall drop-off rates fell. 

Listen as Khokhar discusses agentic readiness, multicloud and multiagent ecosystems and the importance of governance, trust and training when deploying agentic AI. 

“AI at the bank … touches everything we do,” Nikki Katz, head of digital at Bank of America, tells FinAi News on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

Katz leads a team of designers, data scientists, product managers and others who meet the needs of the 59 million clients accessing the bank through its digital channels — its website, mobile app, and its AI-driven assistant Erica. 

“We make over a thousand different enhancements to [the digital experience] every year,” she says, noting, “We’re constantly tuning Erica.” 

Erica adoption continues to grow as it is continuously iterated. The latest stats: 

• About 50 million clients have used the AI assistant; 
• Clients have engaged with Erica for almost 19 million hours; and  
• Erica has had over 3 billion interactions. 

Listen as Katz discusses how her team approaches emerging technology and the application of AI across digital channels at the bank. 

Check fraud is “a growing concern for many,” Ati Azemoun, vice president of business development at Longmont, Colo.-based software provider ParaScript, tells FinAi News on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

In fact, 63% of organizations experienced check fraud or attempted check fraud in 2025, according to the Association of Financial Professionals. The AFP surveyed 521 treasury practitioner members. 

One anomaly AI can detect is signature forgery, Azemoun says.  

ParaScript’s forgery detection software, SignatureXpert.AI, can compare signatures from previous checks and flag when a signature is different, ultimately stopping the fraud, he says. 

Founded in 1996, ParaScript banking clients include financial institutions, government agencies and companies in the U.S., Europe, Latin America and Australia. In 2025, ParaScript partnered with tech provider BIRGER which will introduce the technology to commercial banks in Mauritius, Africa. 

Listen as Azemoun discusses the current state of check fraud and how AI is reducing fraud at financial institutions. 

“We're actually thinking about really reimagining not one payment, but an entire experience,” Zachary Aron, principal, Deloitte Consulting, tells FinAi News on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

For example, how can agents be used for travel, business spending or even date nights, he says, noting that you bought the airfare, but do you need to add a hotel or sightseeing package? Agentic AI can facilitate those payments. 

Agentic AI makes payments “invisible and easy,” Aron says. 

Listen to “The Buzz” as Aron discusses the possibilities for agentic transactions this year. 

The European banks use AI Pega GenAI from workflow automation system provider Pegasystems, Steve Morgan, global banking industry lead at Pega, tells FinAi News on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

Mac Thompson, chief executive of software provider White Clay, tells FinAi News the eight steps he shares with financial institution clients when approaching AI on this episode of “The Buzz.” 

“Fraud is a really large problem and growing exponentially,” Austin Capital Bank Chief Executive Erik Beguintells FinAi News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

Consumers reported losing $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, according to the FTC. 

And that’s probably understated, Beguin says, noting that not all consumers report being defrauded, due to embarrassment, being in denial or other reasons. 
Fraudsters are using AI to target individuals, using it to read social profiles and identify the best way to attack a person, he says. This streamlines an extremely laborious task for bad actors. 

On the other hand, FIs are using AI to boost account security, Beguin says. For example, consumers and financial institutions are likely to start moving away from usernames and passwords and even traditional multifactor authentication methods. Instead, the market should move toward biometrics and AI-driven device and image authentication. 

That’s the reality that Lukas Haffer, chief executive of AI-native loan origination provider Casca, tells FinAi News on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

For small business owners, the “No. 1 problem is access to capital,” he says. The time it takes to close a Small Business Administration loan, one guaranteed by the SBA, is 90 days, Haffer says.
No one has time for that, he says. And this is where AI and a streamlined experience come in. 

Manual procedures in the lending process, including document collection, analysis and communication, can be streamlined with AI, he says. In fact, Casca is working with financial institutions to do just that. 

For example, when a client sends an email, creating a response that includes personalized messaging, previous correspondents, and necessary information, it can take 20 to 25 minutes, Haffer says. With Casca, that message can be created in 63 seconds. 

Casca, founded in 2023, continues to grow. Its most recent fundraise consisted of $29 million in a series A round, bringing total funding to $33 million, according to the company. The round was led by Canapi Ventures. Live Oak Bank, Huntington National Bank and Bankwell Bank also participated. 

Listen to “The Buzz” as Haffer discusses the opportunity for AI in small business lending and where Casca plans to expand its business. 

The Puerto Rico-based digital bank integrated stablecoins three years ago, ahead of the recent excitement around the cryptocurrency, Chief Executive Miles Paschini tells Bank Automation News on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  

“We had the idea that stablecoins could play an important role in banking, so we integrated with USDC,” he says. 

Now investment in stablecoins is skyrocketing. 

In fact, according to British bank Standard Chartered, the stablecoin market is expected to reach $2 trillion by 2028, up from $250 billion last month.  

Spring by Citi launched in 2020 and has a global presence in 23 markets. The payment and acceptance and merchant acquiring service sits inside the $1.7 trillion bank’s services organization and is built on Citi’s Treasury and Trade Solutions payments network.  

“What are [consumers] paying, how are they paying, what kinds of life stages are they in the midst of?” Lindsay Soergel, chief executive at AI-powered digital banking solutions provider Fintilect, asks. She says this information delivers “the greatest value to our financial services customers.” 

Soergel, who has held leadership positions in the financial services industry for more than 20 years, pointing to her time at PNC, SunTrust Bank, NCR, Kasisto and more, speaks with Bank Automation News for this episode of “The Buzz.” 

She became CEO at London-based Fintilect in March.  

Founded in 1985, Fintilect’s client base spans the banking, credit union and auto lending sectors, Soergel says. 

The effort starts with understanding business owners, John Frerichs, head of global SMB payments at the $4.3 trillion bank, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

“Our duty is to be here for our customers in difficult and uncertain times,” he says. 

According to JPMorgan Chase’s March small business sentiment survey, 78% of respondents were optimistic about the future, with about 40% planning to expand, Frerichs tells BAN. However,  tariff concerns could cause confidence to dip slightly in April, he notes. Chase expects the results of its April small business sentiment survey by early May, the bank shared with BAN. 

With April marking National Financial Literacy Month, Frerichs emphasizes its importance: “We want to make small business owners’ life as easy as possible. Part of that is through financial literacy.” 

For example, the bank’s Coaching for Impact program, which provides consulting, on-demand financial education and banking tools for entrepreneurs, has grown from four cities to 38 since its 2020 launch to include 82 senior business consultants. “So far, 7,000 small businesses have gone through the program,” Frerichs says. 

To help business owners make data-informed decisions, Chase applies AI and analytics to transaction data. “We take anonymized transaction data and spin it back to … a small business owner, showing sales, customer demographics and transaction trends,” he says. 

Chase also offers SMBs end-to-end digital tools, including: 

• Payroll integration via fintech Gusto; 
• An e-commerce gateway through Visa-owned payment gateway Authorize.net; 
• Real-time, same-day and scheduled payment options;  
• Digital invoicing; and 
• Omnichannel acceptance for in-store, online and mobile transactions. 

“We try to always bring that all together in as streamlined a way as possible,” Frerichs says. “Small business owners need time back.” 

Learn more about how the nation’s biggest bank is tailoring solutions for SMBs in this episode of “The Buzz.” 

AI has evolved rapidly since fintech Arteria AI was founded in 2020, Amir Hajian, chief science officer, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. The company provides banks with AI-powered digital documentation services. 

“2020 was a very simple year where AI was classification and extraction, and now we have all the glory of AI systems that can do things for you and with you,” Hajian says.  

“We realized one day in 2021 that using language alone is not enough to solve [today’s] problems.” The company began using multimodal models that can not only read but search for visual cues in documents. 

AI budgets and strategies vary widely among FIs, Hajian says. Therefore, Arteria’s approach involves reengineering large AI models to be smaller and more cost-effective, able to run in any environment without requiring massive computer resources. This allows smaller institutions to access advanced AI without extensive infrastructure. 

Hajian, who joined Arteria AI in 2020, is also head of the fintech’s research arm, Arteria Cafe. 

One of Arteria Cafe’s first developments since its creation in January is GraphiT — a tool for encoding graphs into text and optimizing large language model prompts for graph prediction tasks.  

GraphiT enables graph-based analysis with minimal training data, ideal for compliance and financial services where data is limited and regulations shift quickly. The GraphiT solution operates at roughly one-tenth the cost of previously known methods, Hajian says. 

Key uses include: 

• Regulatory compliance; 
• Anti-money laundering; 
• Predictive modeling; and 
• Low-data problem solving. 

Arteria plans to roll out GraphiT at the ACM Web Conference 2025 in Sydney this month. 

For example, Citizens is moving from screen scraping to an API-enabled environment, allowing it to use insights from its private banking segment in other segments, such as SMB, mid-market and commercial, Taira Hall, executive vice president and head of enterprise payments at the $217.5 billion Citizens, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

“One of the benefits of having an enterprise payments function is … we can look at all of our core payment rails and understand at scale … It’s sort of bringing this intertwined aspect to it … making sure that anything we build in one place has connectivity tissue into the rest of the bank,” she says. 

The bank, she says, is moving forward with its multiyear digital transformation, focusing on: 

• Fintech partnerships; 
• Data and analytics investment; 
• AI deployment; and  
• Expanded capabilities for existing tools, such as the bank’s SMB-focused Cash Flow Essentials payments platform. 

Learn more from Hall about how Citizens is looking to balance relationship banking with digital innovation in this episode of “The Buzz.”

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Los Angeles-based Fairplay uses AI-powered data analytics software to help FIs assess the accuracy of their automated loan decision models and provides them with metrics to help identify potential biases, Kareem Saleh, founder and chief executive at FairPlay, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.

Saleh was named one of BAN’s executives to watch in 2024.

“Fundamentally, what we do is help financial institutions stress test their AI, identify blind spots in their AI and then correct those blind spots,” Saleh says. “And what we find is that something like 25% to 33% of the folks that financial institutions declined probably would have performed as well as the riskiest folks they approve.”

Since being founded in 2020, FairPlay has raised $14.5 million toward its tech, according to the online financial database Crunchbase.

Keeping data in check

But even AI-powered decisioning algorithms require careful examination of the datasets they use, Saleh says.

5 questions for compliance

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in June 2024 approved a rule requiring FIs that use algorithmic appraisal tools to ensure compliance with nondiscrimination laws.

Multiple lenders received fines from federal regulators for unfair lending practices in the past two years, including $2.6 trillion Bank of America, $2.4 trillion Citi and $560.5 billion TD Bank.

FairPlay’s software enables FIs to answer these questions to help ensure compliance:

• Is this algorithm fair?
• If not, why not?
• Could the algorithm be fairer?
• How could being fairer economically affect our business?
• Did we double-check declined loan applications for undeserved denials?

Three of the top 10 largest banks are already using FairPlay fair lending analysis software. The names of the banks were not disclosed, but the top three banks by asset size are $4 trillion JPMorgan Chase, followed by the aforementioned Bank of America and Citi.

Its newest partner, $7.6 billion Pathward Financial, was added Feb. 18, Saleh says.

“Banks that use our software are often able to increase their approval rates by 10%, increase their take rates by 13% and increase positive outcomes by 20%,” he says.

Listen to this episode of “The Buzz” podcast as Saleh discusses how banks can leverage AI to improve loan approval rates.

Subscribe to The Buzz Podcast on iTunes or Spotify, or download the episode. 

The growing deepfake detection market is expected to be a $15.7 billion industry by 2026, according to consultancy firm Deloitte. 

AI voice fraud detection startup Herd Security is one tech provider that banks are channeling to reduce targeted attacks against their organizations and clients, Brandon Min, co-founder and chief executive of Herd Security, tells Bank Automation News on this episode of the “The Buzz” podcast.  

Herd Security, launched in 2023 by Min and his co-founder and chief technology officer Greg Bates, "can detect the presence of AI on any live call or previous audio-based recording with less than 10 seconds of audio,” Min says.  

Herd Security will demonstrate its technology at Bank Automation Summit 2025 in Nashville, Tenn., on Monday, March 3. 

Listen to this episode of “The Buzz” podcast as Min discusses how banks can layer in deepfake detection tools to reduce fraud.  

“Business owners need better tools to make better financial decisions, understand their finances and where their finances are going,” fintech Monit Chief Executive and founder Steve Dow tells Bank Automation News on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  

Banks of every size must be equipped with the right tools and data to serve small business customers effectively, he says.  

While major FIs, like $4 trillion Chase for example, are building proprietary technology like Chase Customer Insights to serve their SMB clients, smaller FIs also can compete by looking to fintech providers for the tools their SMBs are seeking, Dow said.  

Boston, Mass.-based Monit, founded in 2019, provides financial institutions with cash flow analysis, forecasting, industry benchmarking and other insights that can be tapped by small businesses as demand for these solutions grows, Dow says. 

The tech provider has raised $14.3 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. The tech offers integrations with banking platforms including Q2, Apiture, Banno and Narmi. 

EnFi uses natural language processing and modern AI models to extract information from loan and security agreements and offer instant compliance, Chief Technology Officer Scott Weller tells Bank Automation News on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  

Digital bank Grasshopper Bank is among users of the tech, he says.  

EnFi will demonstrate its technology at Bank Automation Summit U.S. in Nashville, Tenn., on March 3.  

With outage repercussions in mind, organizations are investing in infrastructure, teams and resiliency strategies to reduce downtime and losses, software company Cockroach Labs co-founder and Chief Executive Spencer Kimball tells Bank Automation News on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

In a survey conducted by Cockroach Labs and Wakefield Research, 100% of respondents said they had experienced unplanned or unexpected downtime in the past 12 months. The report surveyed 1,000 senior cloud architects and engineering and technology executives from Aug. 29 to Sept. 10.  

The report also found: 

• 53% of banking and financial service companies experience outages or service interruptions weekly or more frequently; 
• 93% of executives surveyed said they lose sleep over the impacts of unplanned downtime; and 
• Cost per outage ranges from $10,000 to $1 million.  

Listen as Kimball discusses what is causing these outages and how to build resilient infrastructure. 

"AI is best used when it's most practical,” founder and chief executive of the Salt Lake City startup Tim Pranger tells Bank Automation News on this episode of the “The Buzz” podcast. 

Appli’s solution, which can be customized or white-labeled for financial institutions, uses AI to drive better lending and engagement experiences on financial institutions’ websites, Pranger says. 

Using AI-driven confidence models, Appli takes client inputs including income, debt, potential credit score and determines in real time the likelihood of loan approval, he says. Customers then get “specific, tailored advice to them” about lending options. 

Appli will demonstrate its technology at Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2025 in Nashville, Tenn., on March 3. 

The technology is currently used by three financial institutions, Pranger tells BAN, declining to identify them.  

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.  

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.  

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. 

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.  

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.  

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. 

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.  

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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 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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.  

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.” 

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?” 

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. 

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 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. 

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.  

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.

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. 

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. 

“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.  

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.

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. 

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.  

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.” 

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?”  

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.  

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. 

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.” 

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. 

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.  

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. 

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. 

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.  

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 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.  

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. 

“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. 

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.  

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.  

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. 

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.”

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.  

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.  

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.  

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. 

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.

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.

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.   

"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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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."

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.

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.

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. 

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.”

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’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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.  

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. 

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.  

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.  

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 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.  

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.   

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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 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.

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. 

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.  

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. 

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.