Financial institutions are implementing AI at scale, but logistics should be the focus before diving headfirst into emerging technology. 

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 on the rise, and AI is contributing to both the solution and the problem.  

“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. 

Small business owners need fast access to capital, with fair rates.  

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. 

FV Bank aims to stay ahead of emerging technology trends, including stablecoins.  

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.  

Piermont Bank built its own proprietary API platform to allow companies to tap its embedded finance services, a market that is expected to reach $7 trillion in transaction value in 2026. 

Citi’s embedded finance service, Spring by Citi, is looking to expand its use cases in payments acceptance and foreign exchange by tapping the consumer bank, Managing Director and Global Head Vineeth Subramanyam tells Bank Automation News on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

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.  

Access to transactional data provides the richest insights for personalized banking experiences. 

“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. 

JPMorgan Chase is scaling its digital resources and fintech integrations to support small business owners through economic uncertainty and continued digital transformation. 

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.” 

Financial institutions are moving beyond pilot projects to implement production-grade, explainable and cost-effective AI solutions that can meet operational and regulatory demands. 

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. 

Citizens Bank is advancing its digital payments strategy in 2025, with a focus on embedded finance and omnichannel capabilities. 

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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