New York Times: Crypto Firm FTX’s Ownership of a U.S. Bank Raises Questions. “Through a subsidiary, FTX invested $11.5 million in the parent company of Farmington State Bank, which has a single branch and, until this year, just three employees.”
Brandeis International Business School: Leveraging blockchain to reach the ‘unbanked’. “Users of [Professor Erich] Schumann’s Fincludio app — the name is a portmanteau of ‘finance’ and ‘include’ — choose which services they’re interested in and which banks they want to do business with. Their personal information, meanwhile, is stored securely in a digital wallet on their smartphone. After a user selects a bank, the bank will only receive viewing access to the personal information it is required by law to collect and verify.”
Reuters: Asset managers on alert after ‘WhatsApp’ crackdown on banks. “Asset managers are tightening controls on personal communication tools such as WhatsApp as they join banks in trying to ensure employees play by the rules when they do business with clients remotely.”
New York Times: How Wall Street Escaped the Crypto Meltdown. “It’s not that financial giants didn’t want to be part of the fun. But Wall Street banks have been forced to sit it out — or, like [BNP Paribas], approach crypto with ingenuity — partly because of regulatory guardrails put in place after the 2008 financial crisis. At the same time, big money managers applied sophisticated strategies to limit their direct exposure to cryptocurrencies because they recognized the risks. So when the market crashed, they contained their losses.”
CNET: Social Security Numbers Stolen in Flagstar Bank Data Breach. “The personal information, including Social Security numbers, of more than 1.5 million Flagstar Bank customers was compromised in a data breach late last year, the company said. The Michigan-based bank, which operates 150 branches and is one of the country’s largest mortgage lenders, said in a disclosure to the state of Maine that its systems were hacked between Dec. 3 and 4 of last year but that the breach wasn’t discovered until earlier this month.”
New York Times: When Customers Say Their Money Was Stolen on Zelle, Banks Often Refuse to Pay. “While banks argue that they shouldn’t have to refund customers who inadvertently granted a scammer permission to use their accounts, they have also often been reluctant to refund customers like Mr. Oriach whose money was stolen. That could be a potential violation of the law.”
CNBC: Musk told banks he will rein in Twitter pay, make money from tweets. “Elon Musk told banks that agreed to help fund his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter that he could crack down on executive and board pay at the social media company in a push to slash costs, and would develop new ways to monetize tweets, three people familiar with the matter said.”
American Banker: Banks bid for viral fame with videos and influencers on Instagram. “Bankers across the country are capitalizing on the social media channel. Dunroe, a social media analytics company, tracks more than 1,400 institutions insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on Instagram, which CEO Cameron MacNiven says he expects is close to comprehensive. But banks continue to add accounts and to use videos and influencers to boost brand awareness among Instagram’s billion-plus monthly users.”
SC Media: Cybercriminals target mobile as consumers embrace digital transactions. “With 75% of potential cyberattacks targeting mobile digital transactions, it seems clear that bad actors are going after mobile financial transactions as they see those as easier and more lucrative, according to a cybercrime report from LexisNexis Solutions. The findings were based on an analysis of transaction data from the LexisNexis Digital Identity Network in the second half of last year, which analyzed 35.5 billion transactions.”
Foreign Policy: Russia Prepares Destructive Cyberattacks. “Russia is preparing disruptive cyberattacks that could target U.S. energy and financial industries to cause further pain to the Biden administration, in retaliation for heavy sanctions against the Kremlin for its invasion of Ukraine, several people familiar with the matter told Foreign Policy.”
The Verge: After ‘protestware’ attacks, a Russian bank has advised clients to stop updating software. “In a recent announcement, the Russian bank Sber advised its customers to temporarily stop installing software updates to any applications out of concern that they could contain malicious code specifically targeted at Russian users, labeled by some as ‘protestware.’”
Yahoo News Singapore: Police warn of scams involving fake bank hotlines on Google Search. “In these cases, the victims would search for the banks’ contact numbers via Google Search, as they wanted to seek their advice for various reasons. The scammers would post advertisements that would appear when the users search for such contact numbers. The victims would see these scam ads appearing as the first few search results, providing a fake contact number for victims to contact.”
BBC: Credit Suisse boss Horta-Osorio resigns over Covid breaches. “The chairman of global banking giant Credit Suisse, Antonio Horta-Osorio, has resigned with immediate effect after breaking Covid quarantine rules. Mr Horta-Osorio, who was with the bank for just nine months, left following an internal investigation. The former boss of Lloyds Banking Group joined Credit Suisse after a series of scandals at the Swiss bank.”
Charlotte Observer: Wells Fargo makes another major change to its return to office plans during COVID. “After postponing its return to the office three times, Wells Fargo has delayed its return to the office yet again, this time indefinitely, the bank said in a statement Monday.”
New York Times: Wall Street Grudgingly Allows Remote Work as Bankers Dig In. “Wall Street is in revolt. Across the financial industry, at firms big and small, workers are slow-walking their return to the office. Bankers for whom working from home was once unfathomable now can’t imagine going back to the office full-time. Parents remain worried about transmitting the coronavirus to their children. Suburban dwellers are chafing at the thought of resuming long commutes. And many younger employees prefer to work remotely.”
The ResearchBuzz Firehose is regular RB content presented as individual posts.
For digest-type posts a couple of times a day, please visit ResearchBuzz.
Want to know how to best use the Firehose for content discovery?
Check out this handy article.