Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS
00:11:20 · James A. Brown
[00:11:20] S5: Yeah. I mean, if I take us back just for a moment, just let's say pre COVID, you know, the majority of the world was chasing down let's move away from cash, you know, who is going to be the first country in the world to be a cashless society? And then lo and behold, what happened, COVID hits and that conversation disappeared because we were all forced into the digital world, whether we liked it or not. In The UK, you know, there wasn't the abundant use of QR code technology as there is now. And nowadays, it's just we just take it for granted. We get our phone out, we scan it and off we go. But back to my point, do we actually know what we're scanning? Do we know what data we're actually giving away at that point? Do we actually read terms and conditions when we sign up for things? No. So there's lessons, I suppose. So, you know, not necessarily always dwelling on the negative, but let's look to the positive. Will this maybe get organisations to sort of maybe stop and think actually about what they need to do to actually improve their security levels? I would hope that it probably would for some, especially in, you know, the sort of like the financial services sector, but we're talking about crypto just for the moment. And, know, I've seen some great companies coming out of APAC and some great companies coming out of New Zealand. The first thing that they sort of started with, so that main point was how secure is their platform before they then went to the marketplace. And I think we just need to sort of like turn the conversation on its head over slightly.
00:12:57 · Kate Moody
[00:12:57] S0: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, Clive, I'll probably give you the last word on this story before we have to move on but fundamentally, what do you think Binance and and other platforms in this space at this similar scales need to do differently to one, like, you know, prevent these types of things happening in the future and also to kind of build that trust in customers that an episode at this scale isn't gonna happen again?
00:13:21 · Clive Summerfield
[00:13:21] S3: Well, I I think the problems of this scale are are gonna happen again, because at the end of the day, the the weak link in all of these, these types of processes is the human coming back to the call center discussion earlier. It was always the human agent that was the source of the problems I've been involved in a couple of fraud cases where it's a human agent actually in the bank that was defrauding the client's accounts. And really, the only way to strengthen that process is really, stronger verification over the identity of individuals that are actually accessing services. And of course, with the advent of deep fakes, the notion that you've gotta check to see if the the person interacting with a particular service is real and not a not a synthetic, individual. And we've seen now numerous, hacks where essentially high net worth individuals have been cloned, and that has been used to, defraud the bank. There was the famous case that, Arup, the manufacturer whose CEO and various senior executives were cloned, who instructed the staff to then transfer funds. They lost 25,000,000 in that particular incident. And these are not isolated incidents. These are becoming real and every day. And we've seen this particularly in things like private banking, wealth management, where, you know, there is a lot of money to be had by from tools that are relatively cheap and easy and quick and effective to use in order to create a realistic likeness of a, say, high net worth individual or a person with a lot of influence and power. And coming back to it, fraudsters and particularly the state actors, I mean, they're particularly interested in crypto because it bypasses all the sanctions. Very easy to to launder that crypto via other chains. So you can convert that crypto very, very quickly. And they're also patient. So, you know, they don't mind taking their time social engineering software developers, planting particular individuals into organizations, the famous incident of all the fake jobs or software engineering jobs that were being undertaken by North Korean operatives. So this this is, yeah, this is not gonna go away anytime soon, and it always come back to the human element.
00:16:18 · Clive Summerfield
And I say technology, and this is where, my particular interest is, technology that one validates identity and secondly validates that identity is real is becoming kind of central to any cybersecurity, profile, for many of these organizations.
00:16:38 · Kate Moody
[00:16:38] S0: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, yeah, it'll be interesting as you say to see what happens in the wider industry, like how the wider industry responds to this, also what Binance do specifically as well, but a massive story and we'll continue to keep an eye on it. Okay. Our next story is taken from the papers and that is Mastercard partners with OpenAI on Agent Pay and AI transformation. Mastercard has announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI as the payments giant looks to accelerate its push into agentic commerce. Mastercard believes AI agents will increasingly help customers discover products, make purchasing decisions, and complete transactions. However, CEO Michael Miebach Miebach, apologies, Michael, if mispronounced, acknowledged that Agent Pay commerce is still in its early days with transaction volumes remaining relatively small. The company is developing an entire ecosystem around agentic payments, including Agent Pay, which enables secure tokenized transactions, Verifiable Intent, which records what customers have authorized, and Agent Connect, which helps merchants become discoverable to AI agents. Shopify is already among the first major deployments integrating Mastercard's Agent Pay technology through Shop Pay. Wincie, come to you first on this one. What was your what was your take on this? What does it tell us about where the payments industry sees its next big growth opportunity?
00:17:52 · Wincie Wong
[00:17:52] S4: I think this is super exciting and super interesting. You know, the whole technology that they've launched about Agent Pay, which is about, you know, just making the payment. And then in terms of, you know, making merchants discoverable as Agent Connect, but then the verifiable intent is probably the major barrier that most people face. And by the way, love this episode. We're talking so much about security, I think, as well, which is such the bread and butter, I would say, of any good financial institution is trust, and being able to keep your money safe. So, that verifiable intent layer, I think, is what's really interesting. I think that they're right investing in this part of where things are going. I think agentic commerce is coming very fast. If you look to Asia, you've seen that they've already successfully launched Agent Pay in Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia, I believe. And also in China, they've actually built agentic carboards straight into the hardware, into the devices and into their cars, which is incredibly convenient. And I think that's one thing people will understand over time, convenience. Adopt... Convenience is what allows adoption to happen. A great example is a long time ago, you know, I'm aging myself now. I used to feel like I could not buy produce unless I walked into a shop, touched the tomatoes, the broccoli, and selected the specific one that I wanted to buy. Somewhere along the way, I stopped caring because I am happy for some random person to go and just pick a packet for me, put it in a box, and ship it to my house at the time that I want it to arrive. So things like agentic commerce is incredibly powerful because it will become incredibly convenient. In a world where we are over inundated as consumers by more and more things to do, there's a never ending list of things to do. Some of this load being taken off us for others to be able to do, like the weekly shop or or things like that, will be an absolute godsend to some people and to some families as well. So I think this is the right investment that they're making. I know that a lot of people talk about back when we were launching open banking, for example, in the banks, say that, oh, no. We're gonna lose the interface. I think one thing that I've learned through a lot of... Launching a lot of innovation projects at NOAS with consumers is...