Financial Services Industry – PossibleThreat Articles

Credit to Author: eschuman@thecontentfirm.com| Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2024 03:00:00 -0800

The New York Attorney General’s decision to sue Citibank last week for failing to reimburse customers who’d been victimized by fraud raised some interesting issues for business that go beyond just Citibank. Specificially, when should a customer be reimbursed for fraud and at what point do the customer’s own actions come into play?

To be clear, financial institutions have been routinely refusing to reimburse customers who have done nothing wrong. The far trickier issue is when the customer does indeed do something wrong.

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ComputerWorld Independent

Q&A: TIAA's CIO touts top AI projects, details worker skills needed now

August 10, 2023 0 Comments analytics, Artificial intelligence, careers, chatbots, Emerging Technology, Financial Services Industry, generative ai, it jobs, natural language processing, Security

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already having a significant effect on businesses and organizations across a variety of industries, even as many businesses are still just kicking the tires on the technology.

Those that have fully adopted AI claim a 35% increase in innovation and a 33% increase in sustainability over the past three years, according to research firm IDC. Customer and employee retention has also been reported as improving by 32% after investing in AI.

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ComputerWorld Independent

Q&A: At MIT event, Tom Siebel sees ‘terrifying’ consequences from using AI

May 2, 2023 0 Comments Artificial intelligence, Browsers, chatbots, Data privacy, Emerging Technology, Financial Services Industry, Government, healthcare industry, smartphones, Software Development, utilities

Speakers ranging from artificial intelligence (AI) developers to law firms grappled this week with questions about the efficacy and ethics of AI during MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital conference. Among those who had a somewhat alarmist view of the technology (and regulatory efforts to rein it in) was Tom Siebel, CEO C3 AI and founder of CRM vendor Siebel Systems.

Siebel was on hand to talk about how businesses can prepare for an incoming wave of AI regulations, but in his comments Tuesday he touched on various facets of the debate of generative AI, including the ethics of using it, how it could evolve, and why it could be dangerous.

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ComputerWorld Independent

Morgan Stanley fines some employees $1M for WhatsApp, iMessage use

January 26, 2023 0 Comments enterprise mobile management, Financial Services Industry, messaging apps, Mobile, Privacy, remote work, Security, small and medium business

Investment banking firm Morgan Stanley has punished some of its employees with fines that topped more than $1 million for breaching compliance rules by using WhatsApp and iMessage for business communications.

The fines were levied by docking previous bonuses or future pay, according to a report in the Financial Times.

While the fines might seem steep, Morgan Stanley itself has had to pay millions of dollars in fines for previous SEC violations related to the use of consumer messaging apps for business purposes.

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ComputerWorld Independent

As China pushes its digital currency plans, the US falls behind

December 21, 2022 0 Comments Financial Services Industry, Government IT, Mobile, Security, small and medium business

China’s digital Yuan project, a blockchain-based cryptocurrency for consumer and commercial finance, can no longer be considered a pilot. That’s the assessment by economic and cryptocurrency experts.

Those experts have been monitoring efforts in China and other countries developing and piloting central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) with the aim of establishing a blockchain-based virtual cash that is cheaper to use and faster to exchange, both at home and across international borders.

To date, the People’s Bank of China has distributed the digital yuan, called e-CNY, to 15 of China’s 23 provinces, and it has been used in more than 360 million transactions totaling north of 100 billion yuan, or $13.9 billion. The country has literally given away millions of dollars worth of digital yuan through lotteries, and its central bank has also participated in cross-border exchanges with several nations.

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ComputerWorld Independent

Would a US digital dollar let the government track you?

October 13, 2022 0 Comments Data privacy, Emerging Technology, Financial Services Industry, Government, Government IT, Security

US legislators continue to press for the creation of a digital dollar, raising questions about whether the move could make it easy for the federal government to track business and consumer transactions.

Putting all the digital dollars on one electronic ledger operated by the Federal Reserve would also be a tempting target for cyber criminals.

In March, lawmakers introduced a bill that would allow the US Treasury to create a digital dollar and pilot it to determine its viability. That same month, President Joe Biden called for more research on developing a national digital currency through the nation’s central bank. The order highlighted the need for more regulatory oversight of cryptocurrencies, which have been used for nefarious purposes such as money laundering and other criminal activities.

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ComputerWorld Independent

16 Wall Street firms fined $1.8B for using private text apps, lying about it

September 28, 2022 0 Comments Financial Services Industry, Government, messaging apps, Security

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has fined big-name banks and brokerages a collective $1.8 billion over workers’ use of private texting apps to discuss work and for not always saving those messages. The fines include $1.1 billion assessed by the SEC and a $710 million fine from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

The SEC investigation uncovered what the agency called “pervasive off-channel communications,” that were collected by the firms themselves from employee devices. The employees included senior and junior investment bankers and debt and equity traders.

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ComputerWorld Independent

Planned ‘fixes’ for credit-card interchange fees will actually make fraud easier

August 26, 2022 0 Comments finance and accounting systems, Financial Services Industry, Security

Credit to Author: Evan Schuman| Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2022 03:00:00 -0700

I love it when organizations try and do something good, but don’t think things through and end up delivering unintended negative consequences.

Today’s case in point: the US Senate and the Federal Reserve, both of whom are looking to reduce high interchange costs, but are unintentionally increasing costs for merchants and sharply boosting the undiscovered fraud rate. Not bad for government work.

Let’s start with the Senate, where Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Roger Marshall (R-KS) have crafted The Credit Card Competition Act of 2022. Its stated goal: reduce the interchange fee that financial institutions and card brands (Visa, MasterCard, Amex, etc.) charge retailers.

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ComputerWorld Independent

Banks face a WhatsApp reckoning as regulators clamp down on messaging apps

August 8, 2022 0 Comments Data privacy, Financial Services Industry, mobile apps

Credit to Author: Matthew Finnegan| Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2022 03:01:00 -0700

As regulators hand out hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for record-keeping failures related to the use of social messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, the finance industry faces a choice: properly enforce bans on the use of these apps or find ways to make them compliant.

“The explosion of new electronic communications channels — and the pervasive use of these — raises lots of red flags for the regulators,” said Anthony Diana, a partner at law firm Reed Smith’s Tech & Data Group. “The fear is that, if bad things are happening, they’re happening on these personal apps, not on the sanctioned communication channels that are surveilled.”

Anthony Diana, a partner at law firm Reed Smith’s Tech & Data Group.
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ComputerWorld Independent

Will new EU crypto rules change how ransomware is played?

July 20, 2022 0 Comments Financial Services Industry, mobile payment, Security, Technology Industry

Credit to Author: Evan Schuman| Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2022 05:55:00 -0700

Cryptocurrency has always been the payment method of choice for bad guys. Get hit with an enterprise ransomware attack and plan to pay? You’ll need crypto. The key reason cyberthieves love cryptocurrency so much is that it is far harder to trace payments.

That is why a move being attempted by the European Union has so much potential. The EU — in a move that will likely be mimicked by many other regional regulatory forces, including in the United States — is putting in place tracking requirements for all cryptocurrency.

If it is successful, and the EU has an excellent track record on precisely these kinds of changes, cryptocurrency may quickly fade as the thief’s payment of choice.

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