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.”

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

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

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

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

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

Cybersecurity measures are a priority at Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), from monitoring and mitigation to solution investment.

Banks rarely consider cybersecurity a finished process; the nimbleness of fraudsters and quick development of new hacking technology spur perpetually evolving security measures for risk and anti-money laundering (AML) divisions at most large financial institutions. But keeping cybersecurity agile goes far beyond yearly tweaks and minor investments, Shekher Puri, vice president of digital components and platforms at $1.4 trillion RBC, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.

Cybersecurity is “an investment in perpetuity,” Puri says. “This is millions of dollars every single year that we're putting in and investing into these various technologies. Some of them are proprietary, and some of them we're going out to the marketplace, and we're looking at the best vendor solutions and the best supplier solutions.”

Adding nuance to this “full-court press” approach, Puri tells BAN that tackling cybersecurity at the solution architecture stage of development is key to a top-quality technology and strategy stack.

“Make sure that cybersecurity is built up a lot higher in the process,” Puri says. “They should be at the table as you're designing your product, as you're designing your experience, as you're designing your flow. They should not be an afterthought.”

Listen as Puri details RBC’s cybersecurity and risk management approach for BAN, and discusses best practices for smaller banks embarking on the cybersecurity journey.

Synthetic identities are increasingly used to attack buy now, pay later (BNPL) offerings, says Mike Cook, vice president of fraud solutions commercialization at identity verification firm Socure.  

“Synthetic identities take a different bunch of different forms, but basically, they're just identities that don't really exist,” Cook tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. “Fraudsters will always attack a new vertical.” 

Socure works with five of the six biggest banks in the U.S., including Wells Fargo and Capital One, as well as digital banks Chime and SoFi.  

BNPL is an attractive target for cybercriminals since the loans are submitted with little information for quick approval, making it challenging for companies to filter out fraudulent applications, Cook says on the podcast. 

There are two main ways to launch a synthetic fraud attack, he says, including “credit washing” one’s own credit report to artificially inflate the person’s credit rating and fabricating an account to open credit lines the fraudster has no intention of paying back.

Customer service systems often automate call recording and processing analysis, but you can tell a lot by detecting just the tone of a conversation. 

 

Los Angeles-based Behavioral Signals says its technology is more effective than humans at determining empathy and intention. Rather than attempting to detect the actual words being said and how they’re used, there is the “acoustic” content of a conversation, Chief Executive Rana Gujral tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast, which provides a brief intro to the technology. 

 

Behavioral Signals was founded in 2016 and with its tone determination technology, the company seeks to match each customer with the right service employee. 

 

“In a conversation, there are two big elements,” Gujral says. “One is the spoken word, and then everything else that’s behind the spoken word or beyond the spoken word.” 

 

Behavioral Signals’ technology measures conversational elements in real time, he tells BAN, and can place information in “buckets” of emotions, behaviors and propensities. From those elements and indicators, the company’s systems can determine tone and empathy 15% more accurately than a human. 

 

Bank Automation Summit Fall 2022, taking place Sept. 19-20 in Seattle, is a crucial event on automation and automation technology in banking. Learn more and register for Bank Automation Summit Fall 2022. 

 

Use cases for intelligent document processing (IDP) include automating the know your customer (KYC) process. 

The KYC process previously was performed by humans, which led to plenty of effort and errors, says Sateesh Seetharamiah, director at artificial intelligence and automation company EdgeVerve. Using IDP, one “very large U.S. financial bank” is now able to process 20 million documents through automation, he tells Bank Automation News, without naming the bank. 

The bank “during COVID times faced tremendous challenge, and now this has become the way of the business where we are helping them in the KYC process,” Seetharamiah told BAN. “There was a lot of human effort on this and historically, they felt there were errors, and all of that has been eliminated significantly.” 

IDP leverages a multitude of technologies to automate document processing, including machine learning, natural language processing and, on the back end, robotic process automation for integration.  

Here, Seetharamiah shares how the technology can automate and add value for financial institutions with: 

• Customer onboarding; 
• Loan processing; 
• Loan dispersal; 
• Customer profile changes;  
• Regulatory compliance, including KYC; and 
• Risk mitigation. 

Listen as Seetharamiah also offers advice for how financial institutions can get started and successfully implement IDP solutions. 

  

 

 

Two trends emerging as opportunities for banking-as-a-service (BaaS) are the growth of the gig economy and small businesses, and Green Dot, the fintech and holding company that powers services for Uber, Walmart, Amazon Flex and Intuit, is getting in on the action.  

Green Dot is currently focusing on those BaaS opportunities, Amit Parikh, executive vice president of BaaS at Green Dot, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.   

“It's projected that 50% of the U.S. workforce will earn a 1099 income by 2028,” says Parikh. “That's 90 million workers.” 

There are also opportunities for BaaS in the small- and mid-size business space, which includes close to 50% of the gross domestic product in the U.S., he notes. 

“This space where a small business owner spends more than five hours a week worrying about money, there's so much opportunity to make it easier for everybody to be able to move money,” he tells BAN. “There's a long way, in my opinion, of continuing to make the experience easier and easier for our consumer.” 

Parikh also discusses Green Dot’s core shift to Temenos Banking Cloud, where the company is providing BaaS products, and the role microservices play in its business strategy. 

 

Daylight Automation co-founder explains the challenges 

Commercial banks are focusing on a human-centric approach to relationships that may be holding them back when it comes to digitizing such basic functions as account opening. 

This more human approach is a challenge, Art Harrison, co-founder and chief growth officer for workflow automation vendor Daylight Automation, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  

“A lot of the trust and the relationships at banks, particularly on the commercial side, is still human-centric,” Harrison says. “The differentiation and the value that a lot of these organizations still bring is the expertise and the guidance that they provide to these busy stakeholders.” 

Fifty-six percent of commercial banking executives say digital account opening is the No. 1 technology issue for business customers over the next five years, according to a recent study by Phoenix-based Catalyst Consulting Group. 

That report also noted that the difficulties with onboarding commercial clients come down to complex relationships and workflows. This, in turn, has led to barriers in automating key functions like verifying business entities, according to the report. 

Harrison tells BAN that regulatory requirements like knowing the beneficial ownership structure also bog down efforts to digitize commercial processes.  

The Canadian-based company, founded in 2015, works with financial institutions such as BMO, BMO Harris and Manulife Financial, which owns John Hancock Financial in the U.S., to tackle this issue through its low-code solution, he explains.  

Daylight Automation has raised $15.9 million over four funding rounds, according to Crunchbase. 

The years of anticipation surrounding the development and adoption of Federal Reserve instant payment service FedNow is a case of much ado about nothing at the bank level.  

Although industry experts have wondered what the upcoming adoption of FedNow will look like at financial institutions — especially community banks and credit unions —the onus will be on core providers to adapt and provide, Vinay Prabhakar, vice president of global marketing at Volante, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

“When it comes to FedNow, or indeed, any new payment type, there are few separate factors that play into readiness,” Prabhakar says. “Community banks and credit unions are often dependent on their core providers. It's not a question of them being ready FedNow. It's a question of their core provider being ready for FedNow.” 

Not all core providers are equal; while some have fully embraced real-time payment (RTP) rails, others are still where they were when RTP was first launched in 2017, Prabhakar says. Larger banks that have already enabled enterprisewide payments automation have less to worry about.  

“If a bank has already invested in real-time payments modernization, already connected to RTP, they've already 24/7 enabled their operation, and have familiarity of how to deal with ISO 2002 messages, then I think those banks will find it quite straightforward to go live with FedNow on Day One. 

Listen as Prabhakar talks FedNow readiness at financial institutions, along with possible hesitancy from large corporates to embrace large-value RTP.  

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

Microsoft plans to expand its Cloud for Financial Services offering beyond the U.S. and Canada to Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland. 

Beyond geography, the expansion also includes updated language and functionality, Bill Borden, corporate vice president of worldwide financial services at Microsoft, says in today’s episode of “The Buzz” podcast. The cloud-based offering launched in November 2021.  

“We'll have plans to continue to extend our presence in many more markets and languages in the coming months,” Borden tells Bank Automation News. “We're going to extend the Microsoft Cloud financial services capabilities in terms of reach and function, as well as geo locations.” 

There are also plans to build out the tech giant’s independent software vendor and partner community for financial services, he says. 

“If you can think of extending collaboration capabilities that we have naturally in our Microsoft Cloud set, a partner can actually start to build those into their application more readily out of the box to integrate with Office 365 or to integrate with teams, for example,” Borden tells BAN. 

While some financial institutions may worry about security in the cloud, Borden argues it can improve a bank’s overall security posture by removing it from individual silos and scaling through the cloud.  

“There's a multitude of products that institutions have used almost as point solutions in silos. That can also add to the challenge or the problem,” Borden tells BAN. “Because as things are siloed, that opens up opportunities for identifying weaknesses, and so the idea of raising your security strategy platform up at a scale level, to manage across your entire enterprise — the cloud gives you the scale and the platform to do that.” 

During the podcast, Borden also discusses the proliferation of bad bots, other threats to financial institutions and how the cloud can help automate security. Artificial intelligence and analytics can be applied to threat monitoring in an integrated fashion, he adds. 

The $1.4 trillion TD Bank, Switzerland-based $1.1 trillion UBS and Netherlands-based $427 million ABN AMRO are among the financial institutions using Microsoft’s cloud services in conjunction with their multicloud environments, Borden says.  

“The idea of having an integrated set of tools to do that from edge to cloud is architecturally what our strategy is about,” he says. “We provide a set of capabilities to do that.” 

 

 

As crypto continues to gain traction with banks and financial institutions, experts are cautioning against moving away from its traditional use cases.

Banks as diverse as $1.6 trillion Goldman Sachs and $122 billion Signature Bank have dipped their toes into the cryptocurrency pool, with Goldman Sachs originating its first Bitcoin-backed loan in April and Signature Bank holding $29 billion in cryptocurrency deposits within its blockchain-based Signet platform, according to its first-quarter earnings release. 

But as financial players increase focus on crypto’s non-traditional capabilities and companies like Microsoft and Intuit enable full-scale crypto payments, the crypto use case for banks as a payment rail remains questionable at best, Gilles Ubaghs, Aite-Novarica strategic advisor and payments analyst, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

“Bitcoin, if you judge it purely as a payment tool, is pretty terrible,” Ubaghs says. “It's complicated to use the onramps and it's not that cheap. The volatility of pricing, everyone knows very well. But when you look at things like the speed of a transaction, Bitcoin’s transactions per second are about seven. Visa and MasterCard, they're in the 1,000s.”

Crypto’s applications as a tradeable speculative asset, along with the tangible security applications of the blockchain, are worthwhile and should be tapped by banks, Ubaghs says. But before deploying boatloads of cash to create the next payment revolution, he advises banks to step back from the buzzwords and identify the use case at their institutions. 

“My biggest advice to all banks today is to really take a look at what does this actually do,” Ubaghs tells BAN. “What problem does this solve? What does this do that can’t perhaps be solved better by another technology?” 

Before inking deals with the nation’s biggest banks and financial institutions, fintech Akoya was focused on secure open finance.  

The Boston-based fintech, which originated as an application programming interface (API) division under Fidelity Investments, is now owned by several banks, including the $3.24 trillion Bank of America, $2.3 trillion Citi and $1.95 trillion Wells Fargo. The fintech tackled rampant screen scraping to shore up security at Fidelity before becoming an independent entity, Anil Mahalaha, co-founder and head of solutions at Akoya, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

“Back in 2018, we were part of the fidelity access API group that was turning up APIs for Fidelity Investments,” Mahalaha says. “The reason we were doing that is because Fidelity realized the amount of screen scraping that was going on, which was really concerning to Fidelity, where the fintechs had Fidelity usernames and passwords. 

“What we started looking into is ‘how we can make it more secure for the customer and the customers’ data?,’” he says. 

As Fidelity was building out its APIs and tokenization capabilities, the investment firm noticed similar issues occurring at related companies, Mahalaha says, adding that fintechs were scraping “much more” than just usernames and passwords through their aggregators. This prompted Fidelity and Akoya to reach out.  

“With the help of The Clearing House, back in February 2020, Akoya became an independent company, which is jointly owned by about 11 North American banks and Fidelity Investments,” Mahalaha says.  

Listen as he talks best practices for banks engaging with new and challenging data and gives details into Akoya’s upcoming developments. 

When a doctor’s office switched to virtual office visits during the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses were given iPads and sent into private rooms to connect with patients over Zoom, then waited for the doctor to make his rounds to each iPad. 

While this example of an effort at digitization appears quaint, it exemplifies the perils of digitizing manual processes, says Jeff Keltner, senior vice president of business development at automation lending company Upstart. In this episode of “The Buzz” podcast, he says the example is exactly how many banks approach their digitalization. 

“When we think of digitizing as the goal, you end up doing that — you digitize the old way of doing things,” Keltner tells Bank Automation News. “What people really want is an easier experience enabled by digital, and so digital isn't the goal, it's the tool.” 

The tool needs to create an easier process, and that’s where automation comes in, he says. For many banks, the process of identifying a customer became the digitalization of producing a license; banks simply asked customers to upload a picture of their identification. Then, a person will manually verify the ID rather than having software process the recognition of valid IDs, Keltner explains. 

“You uploaded the document from your phone, but you still waited two days for the person to review and get back to you as opposed to ‘Did I automate it and make that process easier for the consumer?’” he says. “Digital just gives you so many more tools, and so many ways to automate what used to be manual processes.” 

Listen as Keltner shares lending technology trends and what banks need to do to successfully automate lending processes. 

 

Quantum computing has implications for high-value challenges in finance, according to an industry expert. 

Quantum computing can be used to measure credit decay, increase training speed for machine learning algorithms, including accelerating Monte Carlo calculations, and to optimize portfolios, explains Sam Mugel, who holds a Ph.D. in quantum computing, in this episode of Bank Automation News’ podcast, the Buzz. 

"We'll use classical for some things and quantum for some things,” Mugel tells BAN. “Quantum computing is good at things like training machine learning models, which right now is costing an awful lot of energy and awful lots of our computational power. It's really good at things like really difficult optimization problems, which are everywhere, particularly in finance.” 

Mugel serves as chief technology officer at Multiverse Computing, a fintech specializing in quantum computing. He helped develop Multiverse’s Singularity, a spreadsheet application for quantum investment optimization that makes quantum algorithms accessible.  

Mugel explains how quantum computing compares to traditional computing and what the technology means for the financial services industry.  He also shares how banks are already leveraging quantum computing, including the Bank of Canada. BBVA and Credit Agricole also are early Multiverse customers and early adopters of quantum computing. 

PenFed owes its multibillion-dollar growth in total and origination assets to a sweeping automation overhaul.  

The McLean, Va.-based credit union has automated much of its front- and back-end business processes, including origination platforms, decisioning and modelling capabilities, and credit-processing functions. And these technology overhauls were not just for show.  

Automation helped the credit union grow origination annual assets to $15 billion and total assets to more than $34 billion in a few years' time, Jay Fee, PenFed vice president of consumer banking, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

“Origination annual assets when I got here a few years ago were $2 billion a year,” Fee says. “We're at around $15 billion for this year. That's been done through standing up a lot of new channels, a lot of new products, a lot of new automation features, and integration with over 35 different fintech partners.”  

While customer response has been largely positive, Fee tells BAN that PenFed’s automation journey is only “halfway” done, with backlogs going well into 2023. 

Prioritization is essential for credit unions looking to improve technology processes, Adelina Grozdanova, head of investor group at banking fintech Upgrade, tells BAN. Upgrade offers digital banking, lending and card solutions to more than 100 credit unions and is one of PenFed’s fintech partners.  

“We have to think about what else the credit union is working on,” Grozdanova says. “Some of them are thinking about core conversions. Some of them are thinking about improving their own member experience. Some of them are refreshing entire back-end systems. I think the first challenge for us is just making sure that we're in the right priority.” 

Listen as Fee and Grozdanova share insights and best practices for automating at community credit unions.  

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

 

Part of the goal is to address the costs of lending due diligence, which Ballard tells BAN are roughly the same whether for a $100,000 or $1 million loan, causing banks to favor larger loans yielding higher profits while smaller businesses miss out. 

 

"Algorithms are a black box, and the vast majority of people who use them train their algorithms using data produced from biased human interactions," Ballard says. "If you're not intentional about removing those factors from your training set, really analyzing what data is creating bias, is it predicting if a loan will actually be charged off? It isn't." 

 

BetaBank is partnering with Google and global professional services network Deloitte on its AI-based lending automation, which Ballard estimates will require about 66,000 software development hours. BetaBank should both be open for business and have the automated loan process in place late in 2022 or early 2023.

 

The digital bank and AI solution represent something of a lifelong goal for Ballard, who says financially marginalized communities are sometimes left "in the shadows" of the banking system and have more trouble accessing needed business funds. They also pay higher interest rates, he notes. 

 

It's also personal. When Ballard, who is Black, was a child, his father was denied a loan by 13 banks when he was looking to expand his logging business. 

 

Ballard was approached in 2020 by Google, which he says shares a goal of fair access to capital, and Beta Financial sought Deloitte's services because of its deep market experience.   

 

"Ultimately, for me, this is about measuring people — everybody — using the same yardstick," Ballard tells BAN in this podcast. "Not everybody is going to be approved, but if you look at them on the merits of how [their business] performs, I think you'll start seeing some equalization." 

 

Help shape our agenda for the Bank Automation Summit by applying to join the speaker roster here. Potential speakers will be contacted and confirmed directly by the editorial team, and only qualified submissions will receive a response. 

Learn more about Bank Automation Summit Fall 2022.

Sixty-three percent of respondents to a recent survey think resetting their password is a huge inconvenience and 14% would rather be stuck in rush-hour traffic than reset their password.  

And ironically, at one institution, fraudsters were able to pass knowledge-based question barriers 92% of the time, while actual customers correctly answered the questions only about 48% of the time, according to a survey by voice-based security, identity and intelligence platform provider Pindrop. 

These password challenges create a problem for the organizations that use them while not solving for fraud, contends Amit Gupta, vice president of product management, research and engineering at Pindrop, in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

“Essentially, those organizations are adding the friction to solve a problem that this is not even a solution to,” Gupta tells Bank Automation News. “That's where voice absolutely helps, but more than that, an enhanced authentication solution can help alleviate that pain and that bad customer experience and in fact, convert that to a great user experience.” 

The $805.9 billion BMO leverages Pindrop to reduce its incidences of fraud, according to Victor Tung, U.S. chief technology and operations officer and chief information and operations officer for BMO Capital Markets. 

“We started leveraging Pindrop data and some consortium data, and we eventually plug that into our workflow,” Tung said. “We have some automation AI on top of it. We saw great, great uplift” in fraud detection. 

Pindrop’s Gupta gives listeners a peak under the technology hood to explain how voice and voice data can reduce fraud. 

The level of security and service that cloud infrastructures provide makes it an inevitable technology for banks and financial institutions.  

Questions around operational control and security capacity dominated the cloud conversation prior to the pandemic, but the ensuing upheaval caused many banks to reexamine their processes, Narendra Mistry, chief product officer, international digital banking at core provider Finastra, tells Bank Automation News in today’s episode of “The Buzz.”  

Finastra offers a range of cloud products, including Fusion Phoenix, and is partnered with banks including $762 million Seattle Bank and $210 million Puerto Rico Federal Credit Union. 

“The pandemic has shown people that, in reality, banks are not able to offer and deliver infrastructure or security or services like the cloud, with the ability of the cloud,” Mistry says. Streaming services are an example of successful cloud infrastructure from another industry, with providers offering always-on servicing and the ability to quickly scale alongside other business areas, he said.  

“From that perspective, cloud is the inevitable solution for everyone,” Mistry adds.  

When choosing between public and private clouds, bankers should weigh the benefits of in-house maintenance and cataloging against the cost of ownership, he said. While larger financial institutions may be able to afford a private cloud infrastructure, public clouds offer smaller banks lower costs and speedy experimentation rails.  

“It’s important to think that, as much as I want to keep my technical capabilities within house, technicality can be looked after by professional capability, such as Microsoft Azure,” Mistry says in this podcast. “The banks can focus on much more of their business and their capabilities on what they can do and help serve the digital experience to customers. 

“But then again, it's all about the cost,” he adds. 

 

Heang Chan, co-founder and CEO of low-code solutions provider Prelim, knows firsthand how manual and cumbersome customer-facing processes can be. It’s one reason he left banking seven years ago to work in fintechs.  

“I spent a considerable amount of time as a banker and realized that there were a lot of, I would say, places where we can improve the customer experience,” Chan tells Bank Automation News. “You would have customers at the bank have a certain level of expectation, even back when I started in early 2000s, and that expectation has increased exponentially as they are users of new technology that are customer-facing, such as Uber, Lyft and even Amazon.” 

Chan wanted to be “on the right side of technology” and shape that future, he says in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. He also discusses what Prelim does — creating low-code solutions — and what it’s like as a fintech to integrate with core solutions.  

In March, Prelim announced a $1.7 million funding round with EJF Capital, bringing its total amount raised to $3.8 million, according to Crunchbase. Chan explains what the company plans to do with that new money, as well as how it automates the customer journey in commercial banking and lending.  

This interview is part of a new podcast series featuring startups from Bank Automation News’ Emerging Fintech Directory.  

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

Skyrocketing scams and card-not-present (CNP) fraud losses can be blamed on bad actors leveraging automation, experts say.

Consumer scams reported by bank executives have risen by double-digit percentages since the start of the pandemic, while CNP fraud losses look poised to reach $9.2 billion in 2023, a 15% year-over-year increase, according to research firm Aite-Novarica.

While the scale of these attacks is unprecedented, automation plays a surprising role, David Mattei, strategic advisor of fraud and anti-money-laundering at the company, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.

“Fraudsters are really good at automation, and what that allows them to do is commit fraud at scale,” Mattei tells BAN. “Bots are one of the significant ways that it’s happening today. The other way is via a combination of automation and human fraud farms.”

Fraud farms ensure humans step in for bots to complete manual inquiries that cybersecurity measures have made impossible to automate, like CAPTCHA requests and voice commands. This mix of automation and human input mirrors anti-fraud systems at the same financial institutions that fraudsters target, where process workflows and simple tasks are automated to ease workloads for employees.

Regulatory developments in Europe have “squeezed the balloon” of financial services fraud, Mattei says, forcing cybercriminals away from tougher targets but failing to reduce the problem quantitatively. U.S. banks should adopt machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to increase stringency, he says.

“I am expecting things to get worse before they get better here in the United States,” Mattei says.

Migrating legacy apps to the cloud is as complex as ‘a heart transplant’ 

Banks undoubtedly face challenges when transitioning to the cloud, including monolithic applications, a lack of resources, and legacy processes and workflows. 

Many also lack a clearly defined strategy shaped by business objectives, says Chinmoy Banerjee, corporate vice president and global head of banking at consulting firm Hexaware Technologies, on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. That can lead to problems like “cloud sprawl,” which happens when banks do not have a clear understanding of the scope of the cloud environment, as well as overspending in the cloud, he adds. 

“All of these are challenges that banks have to consider, technology and otherwise, from a change perspective when they're looking at moving to [the] cloud,” Banerjee says. “The good news is that none of these challenges are without solutions.” 

Banerjee offers advice to banks on avoiding these pitfalls: Realize that not all applications are fit for the cloud, start small and take simple steps. 

“If you fail to plan, you know, you're planning to fail,” Banerjee tells BAN. “Migrating legacy applications to cloud is in many ways at least as complex and difficult as a heart transplant so planning very well would be key to implementing some of these challenges.” 

Listen to this episode of “The Buzz” to hear Banerjee share tips on staffing for the cloud and learn why moving to the cloud can ultimately support automating processes. 

Tech and regulatory hurdles stand in the way of a fully interoperable payments environment in the U.S.  

Consumers increasingly expect an interoperable — seamless and friction-free — payments ecosystem, with several banks and fintechs leading the charge through embedded data sharing and real-time payments (RTP). However, the growth in payments digitization has left many financial institutions and their customers struggling to keep up, Ginger Schmeltzer, strategic advisor at research firm Aite-Novarica, tells Bank Automation News in today’s episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  

“Most of us who have worked at banks have lived this: legacy technology,” Schmeltzer says. “The payments spaghetti infrastructure that so many banks have — with 40- and 50-year-old core systems that have been added on to and added on to as new technologies and payments come along — make it difficult to introduce new payment technologies.” 

Technology is only one barrier, Schmeltzer adds. Reticence from both consumers and banks to support data sharing, regulatory concerns from government entities and the hypercompetitive nature of financial services in the U.S. make true interoperability an ongoing challenge for market players.  

Schmeltzer sees new technologies playing a part in increasing interoperability in the United States.  

“The growth of application programming interfaces (APIs) over the last five or six years has made a huge difference in the ability for various players to work together,” Schmeltzer tells BAN. “QR codes have really jumped up in visibility during the pandemic, as people are looking for contactless ways to interact. That is really helping to drive more interoperability in a lot of areas.” 

Listen as Schmeltzer explains what interoperability means for payments systems and explores how financial institutions can move towards facilitating the environment.  

Sixty-two percent of banks say the complexity and risks associated with handling personal data for artificial intelligence (AI) often outweigh the benefits to customer experience. 

That’s according to The Economist Intelligence Unit survey sponsored by core provider Temenos. While data can be a challenge, there are three steps organizations can take to better manage that data, Sue Laws, executive vice president of Business Solutions for the Americas at Temenos, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz.” 

“There is complexity, and there is risk associated with AI,” Laws says. “But once you take care of that, and then have the right resources to know how to best access and then leverage that data — that very much helps manage the associated risks.” 

Computer vision is a form of artificial intelligence that can help manage data, explains Tackle AI co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Sergio Suarez Jr., in this episode of “The Buzz” Podcast. 

Currently, the financial services industry’s use case for the technology is in mortgages, where banks are utilizing it to assess risk. Computer vision can sort through pages of documentation to pull out key information, Suarez explains. 

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

TD Bank’s U.S. strategy for commercial payments leans on back-office process automation.  

While the $450 billion U.S. arm of the Toronto-based bank has been digitizing its payments capabilities for several years, the pandemic accelerated the process for TD customers who may have been reticent to invest in automation. 

The bank’s commercial customers realized that existing “paper-pushing,” manual processes were not sustainable, Jo Jagadish, executive vice president and head of corporate products, services and innovation at TD, tells Bank Automation News in today’s episode of “The Buzz.” 

“We put in place, even pre-pandemic, products that enabled clients to really lean into the digitization of that back-end processing,” Jagadish says. “I think what was helpful, though, was that the pandemic helped accelerate the implementation of many of those conversations that were still on the cusp.”  

Invoicing, documentation and payment workflows were automated for success across TD’s client base, and she adds that a pre-pandemic “integrated payable solution” saw high rates of adoption. Moving forward, accounts payable automation for TD’s commercial customers will be a key innovation point.  

“We are looking over the next few months to enhance that capability to provide end-to-end accounts payable automation for the upper end of our community bank segment,” Jagadish says. “We really looked at the client base and tried to adopt the pricing, the packaging and the solution for the lower end of the spectrum while also solving for our middle market customer base.” 

Listen as TD’s Jagadish talks automation hurdles for commercial payments and best practices for banks embarking on an automation journey.  

Banks must shift their talent strategy from retention to productivity as the financial services industry struggles to keep up with demand for technology-focused employees.  

Training and retaining tech talent will be key for banks in 2022, with 54% of respondents of one survey listing staffing and retention as pressing needs, according to customer engagement firm Engageware. Banks should look to increase productivity and efficiency for remaining talent, CEO Bill Clark tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  

“What can banks and credit unions do to attract and retain the talent?,” Clark asks. “I do not think people can plan to win that. They should try to attract and retain as many people as they can. But to plan to be fully staffed with the capabilities that you want, I think is difficult.” 

“Emphasis needs to shift from thinking you're going to be fully staffed all the time with the best people to getting the most productivity out of the people you have,” Clark adds.  

Clark also outlines the need to eliminate “silver bullet” approaches to digitization and automation at financial institutions, telling BAN that “you have to think about the sum total of interactions that your customers want to have with you, and how to optimize your operations to serve them well in the most efficient way possible.” 

Listen as Clark discusses tech talent, digital transformation and more in this podcast. 

In this Weekly Wrap episode of “The Buzz” podcast, the Bank Automation News team discusses the recent Bank Automation Summit 2022 with recorded conversations from the panel “Modernizing Commercial Lending Through Automation.” 

Listen to find out how technology experts are deploying automation for commercial lending success in the wake of disruption and digitization. This episode features: 

Atul Verma, CIO of personal and business banking at BMO; 

Daniel Seay, senior vice president and director of wholesale transformation at Fifth Third Bank; 

Chris Gufford, general manager of commercial product at nCino; and 

Karen Oakland, vice president of industry marketing at Smart Communications. 

Automating data capturing streamlines underwriting and decisioning processes for banks, Seay tells attendees. 

“It takes longer to do a renewal than it does a new money deal. And intuitively, that makes no sense,” Seay says. “Once you start to capture the data, where you can then use it, snapshot it and say only four data elements changed from the last time we did this. That really starts to change the game.” 

To poorly automate a process, use technology as the starting point rather than the ideation process, Pepe Porrata, chief operating officer at $731.7 million bank Varo Bank, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of "The Buzz.” 

This is because banks can “automate poorly designed experiences that are built to manage unnecessary complexity,” Porrata said. “So you got to really shift the way people think about this thing. You got to start with complexity first.” 

In this excerpt from the Bank Automation Summit, which took place recently in Charlotte, N.C., industry leaders discuss the role technology — particularly cores — plays in ideation. Joining this conversation are: 

• Ganesh Krishnan, enterprise chief information officer at PNC Financial Services Group; 
• Abhijit Chaudhary, chief product officer at Green Dot Corp.; and 
• Alex Sion, managing director and head of market growth at Citi Ventures. 

A growing number of community banks are considering adding cryptocurrency services, and it could give them an edge in the battle for digital customers. 

Thirty percent of community banks expect to add crypto to their offerings over during the next 18 months, according to a report by financial consultancy Wipfli. Crypto gives community banks an edge in the battle for digital customers, but implementation hinges on regulatory guidance, Anna Kooi, national financial services leader at Wipfli, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  

“I think in 2022, it's not going to be a trickle effect,” Kooi says. “We're going to see a windfall, particularly if the Federal Reserve and the OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] come out with regulation to clarify where and how they are looking at crypto, or if the Federal Reserve is looking at offering CBDC [Central Bank Digital Currency].” 

“If that were to come out, you will see even more jumping into this space,” she adds. 

Listen as Kooi talks crypto at community banks, along with the outlook of financial institutions that fail to adapt to an increasingly digital banking environment.  

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

University Credit Union saved nearly $2 million in expenses and revenue gains in the first 12 months after launching its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual assistant Royce in August 2020. 

The savings easily amounted to more than the cost of the technology and allocations made to support the bot, says David Tuyo, president and CEO of the $1.1 billion Los Angeles-based credit union, in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  

Tuyo now encourages other banks and credit unions to embrace AI-powered bots. 

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — In this Weekly Wrap episode of “The Buzz” podcast, the Bank Automation News team pivots to an excerpt from the Bank Automation Summit 2022 held in Charlotte, N.C., March 1-2. 

Learn how blockchain is being deployed at TIAA and other banks to both automate and solve unique business problems. This episode features Russell Schwartz, senior director of payments product management at TIAA, and Ananth Subramanya, senior vice president of digital business at HCL Technologies, each of whom shares his perspectives on how blockchain can innovate in the financial services sector. 

This week’s podcast is from the BAS panel discussion on “Leveraging Smart Contracts and Blockchain for Smarter Banking.” 

Tune in next week for more insights from the Bank Automation Summit. 

While big banks mobilize billions in tech development, community banks are continuing their own technology journeys through fintech investment. 

Fintechs provide community banks with unique opportunities to digitize the customer experience, Boyce Adams, senior vice president at payments fintech AvidXchange, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  

“Your community or regional bank is going to be investing into different type of fintech applications that help power their solution set,” Adams says. “There's good reason for that. At the end of the day, the core business is still writing loans, managing people's money and moving money.” 

Listen as Adams discusses the potential for bank and fintech investments, along with the impact of FedNow on payment data flows and the revenue potential of real-time payments for banks.  

Citizens Commercial Banking surveyed 260 corporate decision makers and found that 85% are looking to banks to provide real-time payment solutions — ranking it higher than other banking priorities such as lowest-cost financing. 

It’s a seismic shift resulting from the pandemic, Matthew Richardson, head of product solutions at Citizens Commercial Banking, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

“Post-pandemic, there's even a higher demand to want to digitize and automate processes,” Richardson says. “They’re looking for a bank that is participating in and offering real-time payments. It’s a signal that the bank is serious about enabling digital transformation and is ready for the future of payments.” 

The Biden administration plans to increase anti-corruption efforts in financial services with new anti-money laundering (AML) regulations in corporate banking and cryptocurrency.  

The threat of government action against banks and cybercriminals is significant, Daniel Hazel, head of customer lifecycle management  at intelligent automation fintech WorkFusion, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  

The “United States Strategy on Countering Corruption,” released by the White House in December, outlined newly expanded tools for prosecuting money laundering offenses. The Department of Justice can now subpoena select overseas financial records and will also utilize the newly created National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team to investigate misuse of digital exchanges and assets. 

“The ability to subpoena banks who have a correspondent banking relationship in the U.S., and to have that threat hanging over their banking institution, is important,” Hazel tells BAN. “No matter what you say and no matter what any bank would say, the threat of a subpoena by a U.S. court is immense.” 

Listen as Hazel discusses the impact of the announcement in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  

In this Weekly Wrap episode of “The Buzz” podcast, the Bank Automation News editors drill down on what Russia’s threats to retaliate against U.S. sanctions could mean for the banking industry.  

BAN spoke with experts who agree: Financial services companies, particularly regional banks, in the U.S. should be on heightened alert as cyberattacks are likely as the war on Ukraine escalates. To prepare, check out BAN’s list of 33 questions every banker should ask ahead of potential cyberwarfare. 

Other news this week comes from the bank technology space, with SoFi’s acquisition of core banking platform Technisys for $1.1B in stock. The BAN team also discusses the Biden administration’s plans to increase anti-corruption regulations in financial services. 

Tune in for a discussion of these topics and what’s ahead in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap with BAN Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson and Associate Editor Alijah Poindexter for the week ended Feb. 25, 2022. 

That led to volatility in the system that became even more pronounced when the “Great Resignation” hit, Sam Bobley, founder and CEO of intelligent document automation company Ocrolus, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz.” “The Great Resignation” is what pundits are calling the high resignation rates and labor shortages that businesses have been facing since 2021.

“Lenders had more difficulty determining how many applications might come in the next month. When you couple that with the problem of people working from home, people resigning or leaving their job security issues, all these other issues that came about, it became really clear to lenders that they don't want to be in the supply-and-demand game,” Bobley tells BAN. “If there's a better way for them [lenders] to manage their workforce by using automation to more effectively flex up and flex down resources, they are interested in doing that.” 

In this podcast, Bobley discusses the factors behind the Great Resignation and how automation can take over more mundane tasks to provide employees at lenders and other financial institutions with more time for meaningful work. 

In this Weekly Wrap episode of “The Buzz” podcast, the Bank Automation News team dives into the latest round of core provider earnings along with a look at a new acquisition for workflow automation vendor Nintex.  

Temenos and FIS released their Q4 2021 earnings this week, revealing tech revenue growth and new expansion efforts. Temenos touted its U.S. expansion, mentioning partnerships with banking fintech Green Dot and $37 billion Commerce Bank, while FIS announced its acquisition of embedded finance fintech Payrix.  

Workflow automation vendor Nintex announced its acquisition of robotic process automation (RPA) vendor Kryon, leveraging Kryon as its next-generation RPA capability. The move will also integrate Kryon’s process mining and discovery technology into Nintex’s Process Platform. 

Listen as BAN Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson and Associate Editor Alijah Poindexter discuss these topics, along with Jack Henry’s modernized banking strategy, in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap.  

Core provider Jack Henry’s open banking strategy will facilitate a fintech-enabled digital ecosystem for community banks as a response to a widespread shift in the financial services landscape.  

The fintech disruptions and digital innovation that have caused sweeping changes in financial services have pushed local and regional banks to adjust. As community banks manage the shifting landscape, they must also take notice of the consumer push for open banking, Jack Henry Chief Executive David Foss says in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

“There's been this real groundswell of open banking demand in the United States,” Foss tells Bank Automation News. “People are telling their financial institution that if they can't get data out of their financial institution to share with whoever they need to share it with, they'll find a different financial institution.” 

Listen as Foss shares the details of Jack Henry’s open banking roadmap, along with observations on the implementation of digital banking innovations.  

In this Weekly Wrap episode of “The Buzz” podcast, the Bank Automation News team discusses the big trend this week in banking technology: the shift to cloud services.

The cloud-focused news started Monday, with news that Fiserv will acquire cloud-native digital banking solution Finxact. This is the first true cloud-native core banking solution running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for Fiserv, said David Albertazzi, director of Aite-Novarica Group’s retail banking and payments practice. BAN shares his insights into the core market’s race to the cloud. 

Core provider Jack Henry and Associates also revealed this week that they’ve been pursuing a cloud strategy for two years. Associate Editor Alijah Poindexter provides the details about that plan, gleaned from this week’s Jack Henry earnings call. The team also notes the historical significance of NCR’s plan to shift the bulk of its revenue to services and software from hardware. 

Tune in for a discussion of more finance-related cloud news, as well as a peek at what’s ahead, in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap with Poindexter and BAN Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson for the week ended Feb. 11, 2022. 

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

Truist Financial was formed through the 2019 merger of BB&T and SunTrust — the largest bank merger in the past 20 years — and is the first substantial merger with a full digital component.

The Charlotte, N.C.-based Truist faced the added challenge of merging just before the pandemic started, Ken Meyer, Truist’s chief information officer of consumer technology, says in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.

“We were officially three or four months old when everybody went home,” Meyer tells Bank Automation News. “We were just getting to know each other and getting started on this journey, and then everybody got sent home.”

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI), such as chatbots and virtual assistants, should serve as a facilitator of enhanced communications between financial institutions and their customers rather than functioning as tech for tech’s sake.  

Key to a successful conversational AI framework is the ability to “orchestrate” a conversation between an agent and customer, providing context for both parties and increasing interaction value, Tony Lorentzen, senior vice president of intelligent engagement at AI software firm Nuance Communications, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. An example of this is an interactive voice response application (IVR) determining the intent of the call for the agent. 

“You shouldn't structure conversational AI as a blocker to an agent. What you need to be thinking about is how do you how do you orchestrate a conversation?” Lorentzen says. “If you're a high-level consumer who's transferring funds, you dial into an IVR and say what your intent is. The IVR can determine who you are, then send you to an agent.” 

Lorentzen shares techniques for successful conversational AI implementation, including voice biometrics and customer sentiment analysis, along with the importance of automation for customer and employee experience.  

In this Weekly Wrap episode of “The Buzz” podcast, the Bank Automation News team looks at a new type of ransomware attack on a U.S. bank, along with an FBI warning cautioning consumers on quick response (QR) code payments.  

White Rabbit, a new family of ransomware, attacked a U.S. bank in December 2021. While details are lacking, the attack could have a connection to Fin8, a group of financially motivated cybercriminals which previously attacked the retail, hospitality and entertainment industries. The attack appears to be in the testing phase, according to cybersecurity firm Trend Micro.  

On the consumer side, the FBI released a warning in January on fraud threats in QR code payments. Fraudsters either manipulate existing QR codes or create new ones, tricking consumers into providing sensitive financial information through fraudulent payment terminals. Risks include malware, passcode and information theft, and consumers are warned to take heightened precautions.  

Listen in for a discussion of these topics, along with TD Bank Group’s Azure-leveraged partnership with software company Databricks, in today’s Weekly Wrap episode with BAN Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson and Associate Editor Alijah Poindexter.