Loraine Lawson 00:06
Hi everyone, I’m Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson. And welcome to the Buzz from Bank automation News where we explore how automation and emerging technology is transforming the banking industry. This is our Weekly wrap. First, I’d like to say thank you to our sponsor Glia for your support this week, I’m pleased to be joined Associate Editor Alijah Poindexter. It is February 4 2022. Here’s the top news stories on automation. Financial institutions are being targeted in new attacks and automated ways including a new ransomware attack called White Rabbit. White Rabbit was detected in an attack on the US Bank in December although the company that detected this ransomware Trend Micro did not have specifics about that individual attack in this new ransomware is in the testing phase, and that it could be detected to fin eight a financially motivated cyber gang that has previously targeted the retail hospitality and entertainment industries. Alijah, this week, learned that attacks that leverage QR codes are also on the rise allegedly. How do these attacks work?Alijah Poindexter 01:10
Yeah, so this story was spurred by there was a warning from the FBI, which is pretty big. They caution consumers on you know the risks of freely scanning QR codes for payments. This has been facilitated obviously, by the growth in digital banking and payments, as consumers use QR codes to scan pretty much everything you know from restaurant bills and public parking, to build payment and real time money transfers. And you know, how it works is that QR codes don’t initiate payment directly. Instead, they lead the customer to another site for payment. And then you know fraudsters they can manipulate existing QR codes or they can create brand new ones from which consumers are led to fraudulent payment terminals. And then from there, the fraudster either collect simply collects the payment info, accesses your accounts and does what they you know, they do what they do. Or they can also put malware on your device, which opens up a whole new world of risks. So this is a tricky little fraud trend, that can definitely, definitely leave consumers in the cold as the FBI has warned.Loraine Lawson 02:10
Well, also, this week reported a number of banking transactions. In fact, if you haven’t yet, check out our new Wednesday column devoted to deals between banks and fintechs. And we’d welcome in the submissions. But one deal that stood out this week to us and we reported on it separately is TD Bank Group’s partnership with data bricks, which they are leveraging for machine learning and data insights. Again, Elijah covered this news, what capabilities does this partnership bring to TD Bank Group?

Alijah Poindexter 02:40
Yeah, so this is a really interesting partnership, I had a chance to speak with TD Bank. And this is going to be leveraged through TDs, Microsoft Azure Data state. This is going to bring enhanced data science and engineering capabilities to the bank, along with machine learning and interactive notebooks for building out analytical models. So it’s great for unlocking the sort of vast sets of banking and financial data that a banking giant like TD has access to. And now this move is part of a larger shift. A TD is looking to migrate their big data from on premises to the cloud as of writing. And as a speaking with TD Bank. TD had migrated a third of its big data to the cloud. But this process is going to continue over the next year. And the end goal is a you know comprehensive data platform with an analytics engine and an API enabled build. And this comes on the heels of the bank’s announcement that it’s going to hire 2000 New Tech roles to help support the shift. So again, really, really exciting stuff.

Loraine Lawson 03:39
That’s interesting about the tech roles, you know, that’s tech talent right now being sort of competing with fintechs and other banks and technology companies for technical talent, so it’d be interesting to learn more about how they build that out. In related news, we did have a five questions interview with TD Bank, so you CIO TD Bank is under the TD Bank Group. But Dan was previously TD Bank Group’s chief architecture but now she is TD bass CIO, so be sure to check out that interview on big automation News. This week. We also reported on news that aperture merged its aperture Express and aperture open into one platform. So all baikie Customers have access to that full platform starting immediately. Now, aperture is the newcomer in the digital banking space. It was founded in 2017. in Wilmington, North Carolina it has 310 employees give you a comparison. It’s competing against much larger companies such as backbase, NCR and MX. Although what aperture has done is target banks and credit unions in the 500 million to 10 billion in assets rage. The 80 never know America group ranked them as a vendor to watch along without Padma our alchimie but it never does. aperture along with backbase had the highest scores in client service and had strong customer advisory boards and high performing client support. It also noticed though, Elijah, that aperture is in a race to build out features and functionalities such as peer to peer functionality that more established competitors already have launched. So it’ll be interesting to see if this moves the competitive needle somewhat for them in 2022. Another thing that I found interesting because I love all things data about the new update is they introduced a new data and intelligence tool or analytics tool that allows financial institutions to connect siloed data from across applications and data services, including third parties into a common data layer. This may help address a pain point for Bates. I’ve frequently heard banks are drowning in data but struggle to derive insights to it.

Alijah Poindexter 05:51
Well, this certainly ties back Lorraine to the TD Bank, TD Bank Group and the data bricks announcement from you know, that I wrote that story on earlier this week in that there are just these vast streams of deep and insightful banking data and financial data that banks be at large banks, small banks are in the middle have access to, but of course, some of them may struggle with that sort of digital innovation required to unlock that data and to kind of explore it and draw the correct insights from it, and then apply it to both back end and front end processes. But vendors like aperture are more than happy to provide. So I think it’s really, really exciting because at the end of the day, there’s banking stuff, you know, the digital banking stuff, it’s built on data. And I think it’s super important that banks like TD TD Bank Group, or banks that aperture works with have the ability to continue to innovate on that side of things, you know, to be able to continue to innovate, to be able to draw insights out of these big streams of data and create something meaningful out of it for their customers.

Loraine Lawson 06:52
Yeah, absolutely. Elijah, what are you investigating for next week?

Alijah Poindexter 06:57
Well, next week on Monday, I have a really exciting podcast going up, I had a chance to speak with Tony Lorenson. From nuance they do conversational AI chatbots, that type of stuff. And we had a great, great long conversation on sort of how fencers financial institutions and banking call centers can leverage new forms of conversational AI to kind of help, you know, unlock data and to help their consumers get a better overall customer experience. And one of the key things we talked about was sort of bridging that, you know, I want to talk to a human gap. So it was very interesting to speak about that. And I cannot wait to get that podcast cut up and hopefully everybody can take a listen to it.

Loraine Lawson 07:39
Yeah, I did a podcast or I talked to a Forrester analyst a while back and that was my chief question for him was how do you get out of the chatbots if it’s not helping you? And he said that he told me that a lot of times, they build in sort of sentiment analysis, or they you can simply say you talk to a human, which was a much simpler answer than I anticipated. Thank you so much for joining us for the weekly wrap on the buzz don’t forget to attend our bank automation Summit, which is March 1 through second in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can learn more about the bank automation summit at Bank automation summit.com. For more podcast content, check out big automation news.com and search the buzz from big automation news on iTunes and Spotify.

Loraine Lawson 00:06
Hi everyone, I’m Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson. And welcome to the Buzz from Bank automation News where we explore how automation and emerging technology is transforming the banking industry. This is our Weekly wrap. First, I’d like to say thank you to our sponsor Glia for your support this week, I’m pleased to be joined Associate Editor Alijah Poindexter. It is February 4 2022. Here’s the top news stories on automation. Financial institutions are being targeted in new attacks and automated ways including a new ransomware attack called White Rabbit. White Rabbit was detected in an attack on the US Bank in December although the company that detected this ransomware Trend Micro did not have specifics about that individual attack in this new ransomware is in the testing phase, and that it could be detected to fin eight a financially motivated cyber gang that has previously targeted the retail hospitality and entertainment industries. Alijah, this week, learned that attacks that leverage QR codes are also on the rise allegedly. How do these attacks work?Alijah Poindexter 01:10
Yeah, so this story was spurred by there was a warning from the FBI, which is pretty big. They caution consumers on you know the risks of freely scanning QR codes for payments. This has been facilitated obviously, by the growth in digital banking and payments, as consumers use QR codes to scan pretty much everything you know from restaurant bills and public parking, to build payment and real time money transfers. And you know, how it works is that QR codes don’t initiate payment directly. Instead, they lead the customer to another site for payment. And then you know fraudsters they can manipulate existing QR codes or they can create brand new ones from which consumers are led to fraudulent payment terminals. And then from there, the fraudster either collect simply collects the payment info, accesses your accounts and does what they you know, they do what they do. Or they can also put malware on your device, which opens up a whole new world of risks. So this is a tricky little fraud trend, that can definitely, definitely leave consumers in the cold as the FBI has warned.Loraine Lawson 02:10
Well, also, this week reported a number of banking transactions. In fact, if you haven’t yet, check out our new Wednesday column devoted to deals between banks and fintechs. And we’d welcome in the submissions. But one deal that stood out this week to us and we reported on it separately is TD Bank Group’s partnership with data bricks, which they are leveraging for machine learning and data insights. Again, Elijah covered this news, what capabilities does this partnership bring to TD Bank Group?

Alijah Poindexter 02:40
Yeah, so this is a really interesting partnership, I had a chance to speak with TD Bank. And this is going to be leveraged through TDs, Microsoft Azure Data state. This is going to bring enhanced data science and engineering capabilities to the bank, along with machine learning and interactive notebooks for building out analytical models. So it’s great for unlocking the sort of vast sets of banking and financial data that a banking giant like TD has access to. And now this move is part of a larger shift. A TD is looking to migrate their big data from on premises to the cloud as of writing. And as a speaking with TD Bank. TD had migrated a third of its big data to the cloud. But this process is going to continue over the next year. And the end goal is a you know comprehensive data platform with an analytics engine and an API enabled build. And this comes on the heels of the bank’s announcement that it’s going to hire 2000 New Tech roles to help support the shift. So again, really, really exciting stuff.

Loraine Lawson 03:39
That’s interesting about the tech roles, you know, that’s tech talent right now being sort of competing with fintechs and other banks and technology companies for technical talent, so it’d be interesting to learn more about how they build that out. In related news, we did have a five questions interview with TD Bank, so you CIO TD Bank is under the TD Bank Group. But Dan was previously TD Bank Group’s chief architecture but now she is TD bass CIO, so be sure to check out that interview on big automation News. This week. We also reported on news that aperture merged its aperture Express and aperture open into one platform. So all baikie Customers have access to that full platform starting immediately. Now, aperture is the newcomer in the digital banking space. It was founded in 2017. in Wilmington, North Carolina it has 310 employees give you a comparison. It’s competing against much larger companies such as backbase, NCR and MX. Although what aperture has done is target banks and credit unions in the 500 million to 10 billion in assets rage. The 80 never know America group ranked them as a vendor to watch along without Padma our alchimie but it never does. aperture along with backbase had the highest scores in client service and had strong customer advisory boards and high performing client support. It also noticed though, Elijah, that aperture is in a race to build out features and functionalities such as peer to peer functionality that more established competitors already have launched. So it’ll be interesting to see if this moves the competitive needle somewhat for them in 2022. Another thing that I found interesting because I love all things data about the new update is they introduced a new data and intelligence tool or analytics tool that allows financial institutions to connect siloed data from across applications and data services, including third parties into a common data layer. This may help address a pain point for Bates. I’ve frequently heard banks are drowning in data but struggle to derive insights to it.

Alijah Poindexter 05:51
Well, this certainly ties back Lorraine to the TD Bank, TD Bank Group and the data bricks announcement from you know, that I wrote that story on earlier this week in that there are just these vast streams of deep and insightful banking data and financial data that banks be at large banks, small banks are in the middle have access to, but of course, some of them may struggle with that sort of digital innovation required to unlock that data and to kind of explore it and draw the correct insights from it, and then apply it to both back end and front end processes. But vendors like aperture are more than happy to provide. So I think it’s really, really exciting because at the end of the day, there’s banking stuff, you know, the digital banking stuff, it’s built on data. And I think it’s super important that banks like TD TD Bank Group, or banks that aperture works with have the ability to continue to innovate on that side of things, you know, to be able to continue to innovate, to be able to draw insights out of these big streams of data and create something meaningful out of it for their customers.

Loraine Lawson 06:52
Yeah, absolutely. Elijah, what are you investigating for next week?

Alijah Poindexter 06:57
Well, next week on Monday, I have a really exciting podcast going up, I had a chance to speak with Tony Lorenson. From nuance they do conversational AI chatbots, that type of stuff. And we had a great, great long conversation on sort of how fencers financial institutions and banking call centers can leverage new forms of conversational AI to kind of help, you know, unlock data and to help their consumers get a better overall customer experience. And one of the key things we talked about was sort of bridging that, you know, I want to talk to a human gap. So it was very interesting to speak about that. And I cannot wait to get that podcast cut up and hopefully everybody can take a listen to it.

Loraine Lawson 07:39
Yeah, I did a podcast or I talked to a Forrester analyst a while back and that was my chief question for him was how do you get out of the chatbots if it’s not helping you? And he said that he told me that a lot of times, they build in sort of sentiment analysis, or they you can simply say you talk to a human, which was a much simpler answer than I anticipated. Thank you so much for joining us for the weekly wrap on the buzz don’t forget to attend our bank automation Summit, which is March 1 through second in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can learn more about the bank automation summit at Bank automation summit.com. For more podcast content, check out big automation news.com and search the buzz from big automation news on iTunes and Spotify.