FinAi Podcast

Facebook for years may have topped cybersecurity firm Vade’s “Phishers’ Favorites,” a report of the most impersonated brands in phishing attacks, but the $2 trillion Credit Agricole bank recently edged out the social media giant with 17,755 unique phishing URLs. 

Facebook’s topple from the No. 1 spot was a surprise, Adrien Gendre, chief product officer at the AI-based cybersecurity firm, tells Bank Automation News in this week’s episode of “The Buzz.” 

“Facebook has been the top of that list for four years,” Gendre says. “Obviously, Credit Agricole is less famous worldwide than Facebook.”  

Credit Agricole wasn’t the only financial institution to make the list. Seven others, including $3.7 trillion Chase, $1.9 trillion Wells Fargo and $2.98 trillion HSBC, ranked in the top-25 brands used in cyberattacks that leverage fake websites and emails to gain credentials from unsuspecting employees and customers. 

In this podcast, Gendre and BAN explore how banks became a popular lure for phishing schemes, and what financial institutions can do to protect their brands. 

Payments remain an essentially manual process despite the move toward automation, Steve Kramer, vice president of product at billing and payments platform PayNearMe, explains in this week’s episode of “The Buzz.”    

In this podcast, Kramer sits down with Bank Automation News to discuss how banks can automate payments to reduce customer friction, including options for digitizing cash and digital wallets.  

“One of the things we've seen has been a serious growth in the use of wallets,” Kramer tells BAN. But while customers use digital wallets to pay for goods, what lags behind is bill payment. At a time when everyone lives on smartphones, bills still arrive via paper or, at best, email, he says. 

“We need to meet these consumers where they are now living, and taking that transaction — whether it was paper, whether it was a reminder, whether it was an email — and converting it to … a digital wallet interaction,” Kramer notes. 

Both Visa and Mastercard offer disbursement rails, but banks and merchants need to wholly embrace digital technology for this to happen, he tells BAN.  

Find out why so many fintechs are entering the payments space and how FedNow’s real-time payments will fit into the big picture of automated payments in today’s podcast. 

Banks of all levels, from large global firms to credit unions and challenger banks, are expressing interest in modernizing their core, Temenos Americas President Jacqueline White tells Bank Automation News in this week’s episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  

The reason varies, but core technology is aging, and with it the employees who can code in the older systems, White said. That’s pushing some financial institutions to move to newer, often cloud-based, solutions with less complexity, she added. 

“A lot of organizations are looking around and seeing that the only individuals who know how to code in their current system or know anything about the complexity and the customizations are retiring or leaving the organization,” White said. “At Temenos we call it the ‘legacy spaghetti.’ It's very complicated. It's tangled up, it's confusing.” 

Banks are also enticed by the advanced data analytics capabilities newer solutions can offer, she added. Financial services software provider Temenos is addressing the desire for more data through a partnership with cloud-based customer relationship management solution Salesforce. The offering will give “a deeper dimension into everything from bank employees that are sitting in the branch to those who are sitting in the call centers and opening accounts,” White said. 

Another data-driven play is Temenos’ May announcement that it’s piloting a virtual chief operating officer (COO) at the $28.7 billion Canadian Western Bank, White said. The artificial intelligence-driven tool helps small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) understand cash flow, White said.  

“It's all automated,” White said. “It’s taking that data from the core and helping to make it intelligent and useful within the bank, because you have this tremendous amount of data and detail on users, what their needs are, how they operate.” 

The virtual COO, which will help the bank support SMBs with tailored lending options, will officially go live in January, she added.  

Earlier this year, the Geneva, Switzerland-based bank launched the Temenos Banking Cloud, an ala carte solution that lets banks subscribe to banking services without a complete core upgrade.  Currently, it has more than 700 customers, White said.  

“The idea of coming to a provider for a turnkey solution, again, from that back end, back-office core to the front end, digital experience in a hosted cloud environment is very appealing and very intriguing to our users,” White said. “It's being very well received and adopted.” 

North American FIs are flocking to Temenos for solutions. In the first half of the year, the provider signed $5 billion Wescom Credit Union and is in the process of signing the $8.6 billion Delta Community CU, the $1.8 billion Sharonview FCU and the $357.4 million Bank of Clarendon. In Canada, Temenos recently signed Saven Financial, a division of $3.9 billion FirstOntario, for a digital parallel bank to go live, and also signed on the $5.3 billion BlueShore Financial for additional products and SASCU to extend its partnership.  

Globally, the software provider is signing the Egypt-based Alex Bank and extending its partnership with the $407.9 billion Standard Chartered, a  British multinational banking and financial services firm, to support its growing financing and securities services offering.  

Temenos [OTCMKTS: TMSNY] shares were trading at $151.78 at 2:09 p.m., up 1.48% as of market open. 

Banks use robotic process automation (RPA) to merge back-end systems after acquisitions and are starting to automate more self-help for customers. 

That’s in addition to the more common use case of automating the creation of customer accounts, says Jesse McHargue, senior solutions engineer with RPA company Nintex, in this week’s episode of “The Buzz.” 

“I would also say that we are starting to see more automation efforts around self-help,” McHargue tells Bank Automation News. “Existing customers reach out to the bank for a variety of reasons,” he says, whether for disputes, basic requests or opening up new accounts. 

The Bellevue, Wash.-based Nintex started by offering an on-premises workflow augmentation solution for Microsoft product SharePoint. The company has grown by acquisition, most recently acquiring e-signature provider AssureSign in June and RPA tool Foxtrot by EnableSoft in 2019. Nintex clients include $9.65 billion Kuwait International Bank; $2.9 billion Alexandria, La.-based Red River Bank; $2.9 billion Queensland, Australia-based Auswide Bank; $1.5 billion Waco, Texas-based Extraco Banks; and $322.6 million Ashland, Ky.-based Ashland Credit Union. 

In this podcast, McHargue also shares best practices for RPA and automation, and discusses how banks can expand their use of automation. 

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

In this episode of “The Buzz,” Bank Automation News speaks to Alok Prasad, CEO of startup CashRepublic, about using automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to help communities of color take advantage of banking services. CashRepublic serves the unbanked currently with two Florida locations where customers can cash checks, make wire transfers and other services. It plans to launch an app later this year. 

A recent FDIC survey showed that 5.4%, or 7.1 million U.S. households, are unbanked, meaning that no one surveyed in the household had a checking or savings account at a bank or credit union.  

Most of the unbanked are African American or Latino customers, populations that have been disproportionally affected by COVID-19, Prasad said.  

“We know that the pandemic has impacted these communities of color pretty strongly and you look at all the data whether it's death rate, you know, they tend to be 40% higher than other demographic,” Prasad said. “So, they have been hard hit both from the impact of the COVID, the healthcare inequalities that have been there, and also the financial inequalities.” 

Prasad contends that automation and AI can help serve the unbanked by lowering the cost of typical banking services. He explains in this podcast how Orlando-based CashRepublic plans to leverage the tech to reach those who feel disenfranchised by banks and credit unions. 

In this episode of “The Buzz,” Bank Automation News speaks with cybersecurity research analyst Micah Musser of Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technologies, and a co-author of the recent report, “Machine Learning and Cyber Security: Hype and Reality” about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in creating sophisticated attacks.  

AI and ML could be leveraged to coordinate spear-phishing attacks that target specific people, or even to build malware that could navigate networks, to analyze what to infect as it goes, Musser tells BAN. However, “could” is the operative word there. There is much speculation as to how AI and ML could be used, but how can financial institutions separate the hype from reality?   

Musser shares some of the ways AI and ML could potentially be used to both accomplish cyberattacks and heighten security. As it turns out, some of the techniques marketed by vendors as AI and ML have been around for 20 years. In this week’s podcast, Musser breaks down what is overhyped and what is not — and how financial institutions can separate marketing fiction from cybersecurity reality. 

Definitions, clarifications and other non-obligation material make up 65% of the information in regulations.

That leaves a mere 35% that involves an actual obligation, according to reg-tech firm Ascent. That means banks and other regulated industries — and more specifically, their lawyers — spend hours combing through information in search of actionable items, according to Andrew Steioff, senior manager of technology alliances at governance, risk and compliance software vendor LogicGate. The company partners with Ascent to offer an AI-based GSR solution.

In today’s episode of The Buzz, Steioff tells Bank Automation News: “Historically speaking, these organizations would have lawyers on staff that would sit there and manually comb through pages and pages and pages of these regulations, which a lot of them are ... just definitions. The real meat and potatoes aspect of it may only be a few lines for each individual regulation.”

In this podcast, Steioff breaks down how the business case for ditching manual efforts in favor of AI-based solutions.

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

In this Bank Automation News podcast, Kissner also discusses the due diligence that banks and other financial institutions should perform to minimize cybersecurity threats while working with third-party vendors.  

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

Listen as Jimmie Lenz, director, Master of Engineering in FinTech and Master of Engineering in Cybersecurity and Visiting Professor of Financial Economics at the Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University, discusses the arrangement with the FDIC and how the engineering school is facilitating those efforts. Lenz also explains the best ways to prevent and mitigate cyber risks at financial institutions in this Bank Automation News podcast.