Hello, it’s the editor in finance Jeff Roberts in Tague for Sheryl. It’s been a year for smart crooks covered A member of the staff of a design company to join a video call with deep versions of the CFO and other company managers – a call which was so convincing that the employee won a series of payments totaling more $ 25 million. The incident, which looks like something torn from a Black mirror The episode probably kept more than a few finance leaders at night. And for a good reason.
On a recent webinar, the CEO of the company Fintech Plaid said Fraud has climbed at the top of the list of things on which banks are concentrating this year. The reason for this, unsurprisingly, is AI, which gave the bad players a powerful set of tools to encourage financial services to approve fraudulent payments. These tools include Deepfake videos like that described above, but also those to create hyperrealist replicas of corporate documents. It is also quite easy to imagine pirates who enter the email of a CFO in order to form generative AI models to imitate their communication styles.
It’s scary stuff, but the news is not all bad. I recently spoken With Mastercard’s financial director, Sachin Mehra, who described the IA strategy of the global giant, including with regard to fraud. “Technology is working in both directions,” he said. “Right now, if that helps us, it also helps people who want to do bad acts and, in this case, people who want to do fraudulent activities, cybercrime or whatever the case.”
Mehra’s commentary on new technology as a bidirectional street is correct and, with regard to the present wave of fraud, this means that companies that remain at the top of their AI game will be in good position to defend themselves. In the case of Mastercard, it helps that the company perfected its Pile AI personalized for years, partly thanks to the acquisition in 2017 of an artificial intelligence startup in San Francisco.
Mehra also says that Mastercard and its customers benefit from the enormous scale of the company’s network, which allows her to detect new types of fraud attacks. “We can see the data not only for a single customer, but we can see it on a network scale … We have formed our models so as to be able, with a high degree of efficiency, identify when there is A fraud event at the network level that could take place. “
The result is that by combining its scale with sophisticated AI tools, Mastercard can serve as an early alert system for its customers – a characteristic that Mehra compared to a safety net. This underlines how, for Mastercard and other companies, the current wave of IA fraud is not only a massive threat but also a commercial opportunity for those who can help stop it.