FinAi Podcast

Scammers are coupling increasingly convincing AI-generated documents, voice cloning and deep fakes with scare tactics and extortion to defraud victims."It's financial warfare," Erin West, founder and executive director of Operation Shamrock, a nonprofit organization that fights transnational cyber scams and financial exploitation, tells FinAi News on this episode of the “FinAi Podcast.”"It is a full-scale attack on consumers," she says. "The FBI says that $20 billion in internet scams was reported to them last year. "Starting in 2020, we saw the trajectory take off, and it's double-digit growth every year since then, with no signs of slowing."From large scam compounds in Southeast Asia to loose networks of individual scammers in West Africa, bad actors are using AI to trick victims and steal their money."They are using it to be able to produce anything and have it look letter-perfect," West says."The technology is in such a place that it is very difficult to determine whether or not something is real or not real to the human eye," she says.Listen as West discusses varied fraud methods, what the financial sector should be doing to better protect customers and how AI has brought "sextortion" to teenage boys' mobile phones.

Bank of America continues to add functions to its digital banking and treasury management platform with its recent launch of Payments Insights. “The direction of the platform is to continue to focus on intelligent self-service and what we like to call a connected treasury experience,” Tom Durkin, global head of CashPro, tells FinAi News on this episode of the “FinAi Podcast.” Payments Insights, launched in September, adds to the CashPro suite of AI-powered insights, Durkin says. The payments analytics capability  comes one year after the launch of Capital Markets Insights, which gives CashPro clients a centralized view of market and issuance data. The ability to provide actionable insights to CashPro clients is built on volume and adoption of the platform, Durkin says, noting that CashPro facilitated 213 million payments in the first half of 2026, up 10% year over year. Listen to Durkin discuss the direction of CashPro with insights at the forefront of the strategy.

 Biz2Credit, an online lending marketplace and direct funding source for SMBs, views AI as a force multiplier for underwriting, pricing and portfolio management.   AI is especially effective for analyzing cash-flow data, which is crucial for SMB lending amid growing demand for alternative financing such as revenue-based models, Biz2Credit Chief Executive Rohit Arora says in the latest episode of the “FinAi Podcast.”  “In the case of revenue-based financing, the big difference is that it is based on your cash flow and a lot of small businesses are seasonal by nature,” he said.   "The idea there is that you are actually giving them access to credit where you can recalibrate those repayments. … By using AI, you can do better pricing on it.”  Most customers use open banking to connect their data directly to Biz2Credit’s AI-powered platform, which includes tools for underwriting, risk assessment and loan servicing, Arora said.   Biz2Credit has provided $8 billion to more than 200,000 businesses since its inception in 2007, with loans ranging from about $25,000 to $2 million, according to the company.   SMB funding volume in the United States increased 9.3% year over year in the second quarter, according to the company's Aug. 3 SMB financing report comprising internal and economic data.   Faster, smarter and more customized lending also is important given the economic challenges facing SMBs today, Arora said, highlighting recent pressures from higher interest rates and inflation.   “What happens in SMB lending, unlike mortgage lending in this country, is that SMB lending is benchmarked to the Fed rates and they're typically floating rates,” he said.   “So even if you have an existing small business loan or a line of credit, every time the Fed will increase the rate, the rate will go up.”  AI can help alleviate such challenges by providing deeper insights into businesses’ financial data, streamlining customer interactions and mitigating credit risk, he said.  Listen as Arora discusses the growing opportunities to deploy AI for SMB lending. 

Loan servicing and software provider Sagent named Sridhar Sharmachief executive in September.  Sharma joined Sagent as president in February from loan servicing provider Mr. Cooper, he tells FinAi News on this episode of “FinAi Podcast.” Mr. Cooper was acquired by Rocket Companies in 2025. Sharma brings experience in product, technology and AI leadership to Sagent, he says.  At Mr. Cooper, Sharma spent over a decade as executive vice president and chief information officer and later chief innovation and digital officer. He solved complex problems, built and scaled technology and learned to prioritize innovation that was relevant to the business, he says.  He will continue to solve fragmentation and friction at Sagent. His priorities as CEO include: Overseeing implementations of its end-to-end real-time mortgage servicing platform Dara; Keeping up with evolving technology; and Building out Sagent’s partner ecosystem with payment, title, insurance and tax providers. Listen to Sharma discuss his experience in mortgage servicing and how he is using AI to solve complex problems.

AI-powered commercial and agriculture lending platform Vine Financial innovates around customer feedback, including the June launch of its Reporting Dashboard. The Reporting Dashboard is an AI-driven tool that allows financial institutions to tap key portfolio metrics hidden inside their core banking data, Justin O'Brien, chief product officer at Vine, tells FinAi News on this episode of the "FinAi Podcast." "Cores do a great job of storing information," O'Brien says. However, community banks and credit unions don't always have teams big enough to build custom reports based on that data.  The Reporting Dashboard offers real-time insights based on FI-specific data to view deposit relationships, liquidity trends, outstanding decisions and more, O'Brien says. This gives community banks and credit unions access to data that they weren't easily tapping before. Vine clients include Primeway Federal Credit Union, Crest Savings Bank and Ipava State Bank, according to the company.  Listen as O'Brien discusses addressing gaps in the market and innovating around client feedback. 

Mortgage lender Newrez has received a positive response to its customer-facing AI tool, signaling a shift in how people buy homes.   Newrez launched Rezi Mortgage Assistant, its customized ChatGPT tool, in May, and has seen “plenty of usage,” Chief Information Officer Brian Woodring tells FinAi News on the latest episode of the “FinAi Podcast.”  “That trend of the more sophisticated and informed consumer is going to accelerate,” Woodring says.   Newrez originated $63.3 billion in mortgage loans in 2025, up 7% year over year, according to parent company Rithm Capital.   “Millions of our customers are on ChatGPT, and that's only going to increase over time,” he says. “We're going out there into an environment where we have inherently a little bit less control, but we wanted to meet our customers where they were, even though it doesn't give us that same visibility and control that hosting it ourselves does.”  The AI tool, designed to address common queries about the mortgage process based on Newrez’s guidelines, is also boosting internal efficiencies because customers are more educated when speaking with loan officers, Woodring says.   “We're seeing that it's actually helping our customers be better informed, which for them obviously makes the process a lot less scary and stressful, but it's a big win for us too because we don't go back and forth as much,” he said.   Tools such as Rezi Mortgage Assistant mark an inflection point for the industry as more prospective homebuyers become comfortable using AI for mortgage advice, he says.   Over the next year, Woodring says he expects more customers “to have an AI agent working with them to help them figure out what they want and how to get it.”  “You're going to see that creating a more competitive landscape, which I think is good for everyone,” he said.  Listen as Woodring discusses Newrez’s approach to customer-facing AI and other AI initiatives.  

AI is changing the fraud landscape on both ends of the spectrum: Fraudsters can use AI to increase the intricacy and polish of their exploits and FIs can use AI to identify scammers in near real-time.But AI progress marches on and FIs must continually reevaluate and refine their methods for combating fraud, Jennifer Pitt, senior analyst of fraud and security at Javelin Strategy & Research, tells FinAi News on this episode of the “FinAi Podcast.”"A lot of organizations that I speak to on a daily basis [are] only looking at the fraud that we're seeing right now, and I think that's the problem that we need to address," she says. "We can't only look at the fraud that we're seeing right now. We have to be able to try to anticipate what fraud might be occurring."FIs need to be able to "think like a criminal," Pitt says, to anticipate the next uses of AI for fraud, especially as models such as Anthropic's Mythos 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Sol expand capabilities. "We need to look at all the fraud that's actually happening — not only within each ecosystem, but the whole fraud landscape," she says. That means implementing the latest technologies, including AI, Pitt says. Concerns about implementation costs and preserving consumer trust may cause some FIs to hesitate before implementing new tech. However, FIs will pay a great deal more in both of those metrics if they do not implement AI and other modern tools to fight fraud, she says."You are going to pay either way," Pitt says. "You pay on the front end for the technology and tools, or you pay on the back end for the financial loss or customer attrition."Listen as Pitt discusses how fraud has changed in the age of AI, what FIs and consumers can do to protect themselves and the critical need for institutions to share knowledge.

Nearly a year after launching Agent Pay, Mastercard is focused on developing trust to drive adoption. “The first thing is the consumer needs to know that they can trust the interaction,” Mastercard Chief Digital Officer Pablo Fourez tells FinAi News on this episode of the “FinAi Podcast.”  “They need to know that if ‘I shop with this agent and something goes wrong, I am protected.’” Agent Pay, announced in April 2025, has now rolled out across Mastercard’s global operations, enabling the company's network of issuing banks to participate in agentic commerce, Fourez says. Central to Mastercard's approach to agentic payments is "Verifiable Intent," a specification the company co-developed with Google and open-sourced through standards bodies including the FIDO Alliance, he says.  Verifiable Intent is an open, standards-based trust layer for agentic commerce that creates a tamper-resistant record of what users authorized when an AI agent acts on their behalf, according to a March Mastercard release. Verifiable Intent “helps basically a merchant understand that this is actually an agent that they can trust," Fourez says. Looking ahead, he says next year will bring more autonomous use cases and growth in machine-to-machine payments, including agent-to-agent transactions tied to business-to-business commerce. Listen as Fourez discusses how Mastercard aims to develop and drive adoption of agentic payments. 

J.P. Morgan Payments is looking to AI to remove friction from workflows — freeing up employees from repetitive and manual tasks. "The workflow surrounding the payment has traditionally been very manual," Michelle Conklin, head of receivables and public sector product and operations for J.P. Morgan Payments, tells FinAi News on this episode of the "FinAi Podcast."  It's "a manually intensive process that has multiple steps throughout," from physically receiving the mail, opening envelopes, extracting documents, capturing documents, entering data and resolving exceptions, she says. That's where AI is transforming the paper process into a digital effort.  J.P. Morgan Payments has deployed a mail automation robot within its lockbox sites, tapping robots to open envelopes, remove and unfold the contents, scan documents and extract data, she says. Removing manual steps of check processing and data capture is a big help considering the bank processed more than 130 million checks in 2025, she says. "When you operate at the scale that we do, even the smallest inefficiencies become significant," she says. "We are transforming a highly intensive paper process into a more digital, efficient and scalable experience for both our clients, but also equally for our employees." Now employees can use their time and resources for exceptions, problem solving, client support and oversight. Listen as Conklin discusses how J.P. Morgan Payments is using AI to digitalize historically manual processes. 

Small businesses are increasingly looking to AI to improve operations – and banks must be able to meet the needs of those clients. According to the 2026 TD Financial Preparedness Survey, released in April, 69% of business owners already use AI to reduce expenses, up from 39% in the 2025 survey. The survey polled 1,000 U.S. business owners with 100 or fewer employees. “That was a dramatic increase,” Chris Ward, head of small business banking at TD Bank U.S., tells FinAi News on this episode of the “FinAi Podcast.” In the survey, small business owners identified the top benefits of AI for their businesses: Customer service; Fraud and cybersecurity; and Sales and marketing. AI in SMB bankingWhile small businesses deploy AI internally, they are also looking to their financial services provider for advice and insights. “Operating a small business is really complex nowadays,” Ward says. “It’s tough to be a small business owner, so we found that giving tools to our business customers to help them manage their cash flow is more important than ever.” That’s where the bank’s Small Business Dashboard, or cash flow management tool, comes into play, he says. It offers insights, forecasts future cash flow needs and allows for benchmarking across other businesses in the same industry. “They’re looking for information and they’re looking for somebody who can help them manage their cash flow more intelligently,” Ward says. Listen as Ward discusses how SMBs use AI and how TD is keeping up with the demand for intelligent small business banking solutions.