Snippings

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On February 1 last year Colin received a letter from a company called Insolvency Investigations. It looked professional: a blue and green hexagon logo was in the top right corner, opposite Colin’s address. Scammers had copied all the details from Companies House of the real Insolvency Investigations, a legitimate company set up more than a decade ago.

From: Fraudsters stole £260k from Colin before he died. We called them up.

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While a person might be (and, indeed, was) fooled by a professional logo and nice quality paper, a bot would not be. A bout would be looking for a digital signature, a public key certificate and a resolvable certificate chain. A bot would know that this is not the real company, because the scammers would not have access to the real company’s private key.

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Why should fintech care?

This isn’t about nostalgia or clinging to old systems. It’s about designing a truly antifragile ecosystem, where redundancy is built in and payment continuity is guaranteed in every scenario. Fintech innovators should view cash not as competition, but as a complementary anchor that underwrites trust in the system.

From: When Digital Fails: Why Cash Still Matters in a Resilient Payments Ecosystem | The Cashless Society.

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France is preparing to launch digital national identity cards through the France Identité mobile application by mid-2025. The program will allow citizens to verify their identity and access government services using smartphones, as part of an expanding mobile-first strategy for digital identity. The move builds on existing efforts to digitize identification systems and is expected to advance France’s role in shaping European digital identity standards.

From: France to Introduce Digital Identity Cards via Mobile App in 2025 – ID Tech.

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Now a new trend in fintech is emerging: using AI for deep investment research.

Many companies wading into this space are using AI agents—code that can understand contextual information, make logical decisions and take actions. Agents can perform tasks like making investment recommendations or creating draft PowerPoint presentations. Just over the past month, trading app Robinhood and Arta Finance, a startup that aims to be a digital “family office” by giving wealthy consumers access to alternative investments, have announced new consumer-facing AI features.

From: Fintech’s Latest Trend: AI Agents For Investment Research.

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Introducing Robinhood Cortex, an AI investment tool launching later this year that is designed to provide real-time analysis and insights that help you better navigate the markets, identify opportunities, and stay up to date on the latest market moving news.

“High quality, premium investment and market analysis has historically been reserved for institutional investors and the rich,” said Abhishek Fatehpuria, VP of Brokerage Product at Robinhood. “Over time, Robinhood Cortex will completely transform the Robinhood experience as we strive to bridge that gap and put a premium research assistant right in your pocket.”

This is just the beginning of how we’ll use artificial intelligence to help power your investing experience at Robinhood. At launch, Robinhood Cortex is designed to up-level your trading and investing experience supporting:

Stock Digests: This helps you answer the age-old question of, “Why is this stock going up or down today?” With Robinhood Cortex, simply go to the stock detail page, and we will quickly generate a short summary of what’s happening in the world to impact that ticker.
Trade Builder: It’s a tool designed to simplify the trading process and help you learn about new strategies that align with your goals. For example, it makes the options trading experience more intuitive by helping you translate your beliefs about a stock into a specific options trade and strategy. We’ll use Robinhood Cortex to show you insights about price signals, technicals, market news, analyst reports, and more, and then Trade Builder will screen the market for trades to consider based on your inputs.

Robinhood Cortex is not placing trades for you, but instead helps you gather analysis and insights to inform your market outlook.

From: Introducing Robinhood Strategies, Robinhood Banking, and Robinhood Cortex – Robinhood Newsroom.

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Sweden’s Bank-ID system has experienced service disruptions due to a confirmed cyber attack, specifically a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Bank-ID officials have verified that while the attack has caused instability in the service, no data breach occurred and no user information was compromised.

The DDoS attack flooded the Bank-ID system with excessive traffic, preventing legitimate users from accessing the application. Bank-ID representatives explained that the malicious signals effectively blocked normal user access to the service. These types of attacks have become increasingly common against authentication services, following patterns similar to recent credential-targeting campaigns across Europe

From: Swedish Bank-ID Service Hit by DDoS Attack, No Data Compromised.

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Persona, the verified identify platform used by a host of fintechs (including Robinhood, Brex and OpenAI) has raised $200 million at a $2 billion valuation. The company says that rise of AI agents, increasingly sophisticated AI-driven fraud, regulatory fragmentation, and growing privacy expectations have created a far more complex — and constantly evolving — identity landscape. As Rick Song, CEO of Persona, puts it “Identity in an AI-driven world isn’t about ticking a box, and the question is no longer ‘is this a bot or not?’ but rather ‘who is the bot acting on behalf of, and what is their intent?

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When Barclays experienced a three-day outage earlier this year, due to a mainframe failure, millions of UK customers were unable to access even the most basic banking services.

The disruption not only damaged the bank’s reputation but also left it facing a compensation bill of as much as £7.5mn. Incidents like this are becoming alarmingly common in the financial services sector.

Despite investing billions on state-of-the-art security tools and seeking to reassure both customers and regulators of their resilience, banks remain highly vulnerable. The increasing complexity of their software ecosystems and the long, tangled supply chains required to support them are key culprits.

In the UK, Barclays suffered 33 system failures between January 2023 and February 2025, according to data from the House of Commons Treasury select committee. Over the same period, HSBC and Santander were both hit by 32 outages.

From: Increasing reliance on complex technology leaves banks vulnerable.

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Agentic Wallets™ are built to integrate with any intelligence in order to create AI products that are smart, safe and personal. They bring the whole universe of data together via one channel, making it available to the AI in order to get the best outputs with the least effort:

This includes any information available on the web. But it also includes private data of all kinds. Buying preferences, medical records, IoT device data, pictures of your cat — whatever. And it integrates the transactions and credentials familiar from digital wallets today. Things like credit cards, boarding passes, tickets and increasingly, mobile drivers’ licenses (mDLs).

Bringing all this data together for each user via one channel is the crucial step in making AI personal and safe for customers. People work at the intersections of public, private and transactional data dozens of times a day in order to get things done online. But AIs can’t easily cross those boundaries. A simple instruction like “Make me a meal plan for this week” becomes much more powerful when the AI has access not only to internet recipes (public data), but also context-aware of my dietary restrictions (private data) and knowledge of what I bought at the grocery store yesterday (transactional data).

From: Agentic Wallets: Building AI-Driven Customer Experiences.

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ck in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg and other top Facebook executives were dreaming big about how to design the company’s first generation of smart glasses. One feature they considered adding to them was facial recognition, which would have allowed someone wearing the glasses to, say, identify a person they bumped into at a party. Ultimately, though, Zuckerberg and the others discarded the idea, which presented a mountain of both technical challenges and ethical questions about privacy invasion.

That was then. Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms, is once again actively working on facial recognition: Earlier this year, the company discussed adding software that could identify people by name to its smart glasses and other devices, such as artificial intelligence-powered earphones with cameras, according to three people involved in discussions about the feature.

Meta isn’t the only tech company rethinking its privacy decisions.

From: Meta Renews Work on Facial Recognition Tech as Privacy Worries Fade — The Information.

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