Three years in, open banking is finally gaining momentum. According to the UK’s Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBiE), in 2020 nearly six billion calls were made via application programming interfaces (APIs) to bank servers in the UK and more than four million open banking payments were completed. In comparison, 2018 saw 66.8 million API calls…

As part of our survey of 14,000 people across 14 countries, we set out to uncover customers’ attitudes to digital account openings for financial services. We also wanted to see whether people have a good understanding of why they must prove they are who they say they are. Globally, the survey showed an overwhelming majority are willing to open some kind of financia…

With an estimated 18.7 million coins in circulation, the overall market value of Bitcoin is about $1.1 trillion—too big for banks to ignore. In March of this year, Citigroup said, in a 108-page report on the topic, that bitcoin “may be optimally positioned to become the preferred currency for global trade.” Last month, too, JPMorgan Chase launched a structure note off…

A fraudster’s perfect storm has broken in the UK. When the country voted in favour of Brexit in June 2016, it signalled the start of a long, painstaking journey to split from the European Union. Politicians clashed over trade deals, European citizens living in the UK became unsure of their residential status, and newspaper headlines provoked more questions than they a…

Just as the pandemic put huge stresses on the health care system, it put huge stresses on fraud and financial crime management teams. Teams that collaborate in person and work with large software systems that have restricted access found that working from home hurt their productivity. This was compounded as the volume of fraud attacks rose. Our latest survey of fra…

Over the last year, the global pandemic has profoundly impacted fraud trends, with financial criminals feasting on a desperate stew of consumer loneliness, financial difficulties, boredom and desperation. A few months ago my colleague TJ Horan blogged about money muling, a crime in which unsuspecting folks are duped into illegally transferring ill-gotten funds on beha…