The Buzz

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

FairPlay, a “fairness as a service” startup is launching an index tool in Q3 of this year that shows financial institutions how their underwriting affects consumers.Los Angeles-based Fairplay uses AI-powered data analytics software to help FIs assess the accuracy of their automated loan decision models and provides them with metrics to help identify potential biases, Kareem Saleh, founder and chief executive at FairPlay, tells Bank Automation News in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.Saleh was named one of BAN’s executives to watch in 2024.“Fundamentally, what we do is help financial institutions stress test their AI, identify blind spots in their AI and then correct those blind spots,” Saleh says. “And what we find is that something like 25% to 33% of the folks that financial institutions declined probably would have performed as well as the riskiest folks they approve.”Since being founded in 2020, FairPlay has raised $14.5 million toward its tech, according to the online financial database Crunchbase.Keeping data in checkBut even AI-powered decisioning algorithms require careful examination of the datasets they use, Saleh says.“The conventional wisdom is that AI stands for ‘artificial intelligence,’ but it can sometimes also stand for ‘accidentally incorrect,’” he says. “If you don't have a real clear-eyed view about this bias in the algorithms to overfit to the data, then you might miss the blind spots.”5 questions for complianceThe Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in June 2024 approved a rule requiring FIs that use algorithmic appraisal tools to ensure compliance with nondiscrimination laws.Multiple lenders received fines from federal regulators for unfair lending practices in the past two years, including $2.6 trillion Bank of America, $2.4 trillion Citi and $560.5 billion TD Bank.FairPlay’s software enables FIs to answer these questions to help ensure compliance:Is this algorithm fair?If not, why not?Could the algorithm be fairer?How could being fairer economically affect our business?Did we double-check declined loan applications for undeserved denials?Three of the top 10 largest banks are already using FairPlay fair lending analysis software. The names of the banks were not disclosed, but the top three banks by asset size are $4 trillion JPMorgan Chase, followed by the aforementioned Bank of America and Citi.Its newest partner, $7.6 billion Pathward Financial, was added Feb. 18, Saleh says.“Banks that use our software are often able to increase their approval rates by 10%, increase their take rates by 13% and increase positive outcomes by 20%,” he says.Listen to this episode of “The Buzz” podcast as Saleh discusses how banks can leverage AI to improve loan approval rates.Subscribe to The Buzz Podcast on iTunes or Spotify, or download the episode.  

Financial institutions are looking to deepfake detection solutions in their fight against the growing threat of generative AI-driven fraud. The growing deepfake detection market is expected to be a $15.7 billion industry by 2026, according to consultancy firm Deloitte. AI voice fraud detection startup Herd Security is one tech provider that banks are channeling to reduce targeted attacks against their organizations and clients, Brandon Min, co-founder and chief executive of Herd Security, tells Bank Automation News on this episode of the “The Buzz” podcast.  Herd Security, launched in 2023 by Min and his co-founder and chief technology officer Greg Bates, "can detect the presence of AI on any live call or previous audio-based recording with less than 10 seconds of audio,” Min says.  Herd Security will demonstrate its technology at Bank Automation Summit 2025 in Nashville, Tenn., on Monday, March 3. Listen to this episode of “The Buzz” podcast as Min discusses how banks can layer in deepfake detection tools to reduce fraud.  

Small business owners are looking to banks to provide data, tools and analytics to help them make more informed financial decisions. “Business owners need better tools to make better financial decisions, understand their finances and where their finances are going,” fintech Monit Chief Executive and founder Steve Dow tells Bank Automation News on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  Banks of every size must be equipped with the right tools and data to serve small business customers effectively, he says.  While major FIs, like $4 trillion Chase for example, are building proprietary technology like Chase Customer Insights to serve their SMB clients, smaller FIs also can compete by looking to fintech providers for the tools their SMBs are seeking, Dow said.  Boston, Mass.-based Monit, founded in 2019, provides financial institutions with cash flow analysis, forecasting, industry benchmarking and other insights that can be tapped by small businesses as demand for these solutions grows, Dow says. The tech provider has raised $14.3 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. The tech offers integrations with banking platforms including Q2, Apiture, Banno and Narmi. 

AI-driven risk management decisioning and monitoring platform EnFi is automating the credit approval process for financial institutions while maintaining compliance, freeing up employees to focus on other areas of operations. EnFi uses natural language processing and modern AI models to extract information from loan and security agreements and offer instant compliance, Chief Technology Officer Scott Weller tells Bank Automation News on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast.  Digital bank Grasshopper Bank is among users of the tech, he says.  EnFi will demonstrate its technology at Bank Automation Summit U.S. in Nashville, Tenn., on March 3.   

Financial institutions are focused on IT resilience as outages repeatedly disrupt operations such as the ones that affected Crowdstrike, Bank of America, Monzo and others this year. With outage repercussions in mind, organizations are investing in infrastructure, teams and resiliency strategies to reduce downtime and losses, software company Cockroach Labs co-founder and Chief Executive Spencer Kimball tells Bank Automation News on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. In a survey conducted by Cockroach Labs and Wakefield Research, 100% of respondents said they had experienced unplanned or unexpected downtime in the past 12 months. The report surveyed 1,000 senior cloud architects and engineering and technology executives from Aug. 29 to Sept. 10.  The report also found: 53% of banking and financial service companies experience outages or service interruptions weekly or more frequently; 93% of executives surveyed said they lose sleep over the impacts of unplanned downtime; and Cost per outage ranges from $10,000 to $1 million.  Listen as Kimball discusses what is causing these outages and how to build resilient infrastructure.