Snippings

xxx

Agents might have turned out to be perfect optimizers who select a card for the consumer based on the best rewards proposition for that specific purchase. The “race to the bottom” on steroids. This could still happen, but is harder without an Agentic wallet.

From: (18) Agentic Commerce hits speed bumps – by Andrew M. Dresner.

xxx

xxx

Customer loyalty is dead. 76% of consumers are ready to switch their financial provider for better digital money-management features available through open finance, and 44% already have.

That’s a tidal wave, and the result of surveying 8,000 consumers across 11 markets by Mastercard and FT Longitude.

From: Bank Customer Loyalty is Dead: 89% of Your US Customers Are Ready to Walk, 76% Global.

xxx

xxx

The big change in financial services will come when customers use AI to assess offers from financial institutions for themselves. They will have access to AI as powerful as the banks have, because Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon (and companies like them) will be giving it to them. And this will mean individuals will not be the customers: their bots will be.

From: Where are the customers’ bots? The AI paradigm shift in retail banking | HSTalks.

xxx

xxx

Mercor, an AI company valued at $10 billion, has been the victim of a major data breach which appears to include ID documents along with user face and voice biometrics.
The highly valued startup supplies training data to major artificial intelligence companies including Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta. The three‑year‑old firm said the breach was tied to a wider supply chain attack on the open‑source library LiteLLM.
Mercor told Fortune it was “one of thousands” impacted after malicious code was inserted into LiteLLM, a tool widely used by developers to connect applications to AI services.

From: AI company’s breached biometrics, ID document images make deepfake fraud easier | Biometric Update.

xxx

xxx

Miebach also raised doubts about identity verification, asking, “Is the agent actually what the agent claims to be?”

From: Mastercard CEO shares grave concerns over AI agentic commerce – TheStreet.

xxx

xxx

The CFTC proposed a new rulebook for prediction markets in the US. The framework would allow most sports-related bets while trying to avoid inviting obvious manipulation.
Under the new rules, contracts on player injuries, officiating outcomes, “first-pitch” bets, player ejections, and virtually all bets on war, terrorism, or assassinations would be barred as not in the public interest.
The proposal is notable for what it doesn’t do: No raising the minimum age from 18 to 21, no ban on athlete prop bets, and no return to Biden-era election betting restrictions. It formally rescinds the 2024 ban on sports-related event contracts, replacing prohibition with regulated permission — a win for Kalshi and Polymarket.
Scrutiny of prediction markets has grown due to well-timed trades ahead of Trump’s major policy surprises. Those trades netted millions for unknown traders, and alleged insider trading cases have multiplied: a Special Forces soldier bet on Maduro’s capture, George Santos wagered on his own State of the Union attendance, and many Trump insiders have allegedly bet on policy announcements right before the President’s Truth Social tweets.
Little wonder, then, that the rulemaking doesn’t have much to say about insider trading.

From: In prediction markets, the house always wins (TWIF 6/12).

xxx

xxx

A KPMG report on how AI is being used by businesses across the world exaggerated adoption of the technology with bogus case studies that appear to have been based on AI hallucinations.

The October report, “Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI”, made numerous false claims about the use of AI by organisations including the Swiss bank UBS, the UK’s National Health Service and the public transit groups Swiss Federal Railways and Transport for London.

The inaccuracies were identified as AI hallucinations by the research group GPTZero and verified by the FT.

From: KPMG report contained AI hallucinations on benefits of . . . AI.

xxx

xxx

San Francisco-based Meow Technologies launched what it’s calling the first agentic banking platform. AI agents can now open business checking accounts, issue corporate cards, send and receive payments, and manage invoicing autonomously. The platform integrates with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and Gemini via an MCP endpoint at meow.com/mcp.

From: (13) Issue #154: AI Agents Get Bank Accounts, Your PFM Is Now an LLM, And Aspire Enters the US.

xxx

xxx

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center released its 2025 Annual Report this week, and for the first time in IC3’s 25-year history, the complaints crossed one million. Total reported losses hit $20.877 billion — up 26% from 2024, up nearly 400% from $4.2 billion in 2020. Every metric that matters moved in the wrong direction.
The headline numbers are staggering enough on their own. But the composition of the losses is where fraud teams should be paying close attention. Investment fraud led all categories at $8.65 billion — more than 40% of all losses. Business email compromise came in second at $3.05 billion. Tech support scams rounded out the top three at $2.1 billion. These aren’t emerging threat categories. They’re well-understood, well-documented, and still accounting for nearly $14 billion in losses between them.
The elder fraud numbers are genuinely alarming. Americans over 60 filed 201,000 complaints with losses totaling $7.748 billion — a 59% jump from 2024. The average loss per victim in this cohort was $38,500, nearly double the overall average. A total of 12,444 seniors each lost more than $100,000. Investment fraud accounted for $3.5 billion of that alone, with tech support scams and romance fraud piling on behind it. For any bank or fintech with an older customer base, this data should be pinned to the wall of every fraud team standup. 
The most editorially significant move in this year’s report: the FBI named AI as a discrete crime category for the first time. The IC3 received 22,364 AI-related complaints, costing Americans $893 million — voice cloning, deepfake video impersonation of public figures and family members, AI-generated phishing content, and fake identification documents all called out explicitly. To note: the bureau is now tracking this separately, which means regulators and examiners will be looking for your controls to match.
Operation Level Up — the FBI’s proactive initiative to identify active crypto investment fraud victims and warn them before their losses compound — notified 3,780 victims last year. 78% were unaware they were being scammed at the time of contact. In one case, an agent stopped a victim from cashing out $750,000 from his 401(k). In another, a victim was mid-process on selling her house to fund a $500,000 “investment.” The program has saved an estimated $225 million in 2025 alone and triggered 38 referrals for suicide intervention. The scale of the psychological damage here goes well beyond the financial numbers

From: This Week in Fraud (4/14).

xxx

xxx

The Credential already proves the client controls a specific public key. The source field is the same regardless of the payment amount, which means you can use the MPP flow purely for identity when payment isn’t needed.

From: Identity | MPP.

xxx