J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing was named Best Online Brokerage in REAL SIMPLE’s 2025 Smart Money Awards. With J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing, clients enjoy unlimited commission-free online trades on thousands of stocks, ETFs, mutual funds and treasuries in the Chase Mobile® app and on Chase.com. REAL SIMPLE is the leading women’s lifestyle magazine, both at newsstands and on Apple News+. The Smart Money Awards recognize innovative financial products and services that simplify money management for consumers. “J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing continues to shine in the industry and is a great place for people to get started on growing their money,” said Kristin Lemkau, CEO of J.P. Morgan Wealth Management. REAL SIMPLE highlights that JPMorganChase clients can seamlessly manage their investments, bank accounts, credit cards, auto loans and mortgages – all within the Chase Mobile® app and on Chase.com. In addition, clients have access to J.P. Morgan’s retirement desk, which connects them with specialists who can walk them through retirement accounts rollovers and answer in-depth questions. J.P. Morgan Self-Directed Investing customers can open an account in a few quick steps and invest on-the-go. New customers can earn up to $700 when they open and fund an eligible account with qualifying new money. All customers have access to thousands of investments.
Citi enhances CitiDirect Commercial Banking Platform with AI-driven automation for streamlining data extraction, form filling, client query routing and fraud detection, proactive guidance and ‘Next-best-action’ suggestions
Citi’s single-entry point digital client platform for commercial banking clients, CitiDirect® Commercial Banking, continues to be rolled out globally, and now has additional enhanced functionality, leveraging the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to achieve client experience efficiencies as well as streamlined digital enhancements. Launched in 2023, the platform now supports more than 57% of Citi’s total commercial banking client base globally. It is live in the U.S., Hong Kong, India, Singapore, the U.K., Canada, Australia and Brazil, with approximately 2.3 million client sessions*, referring to a period of active user engagement with the platform, typically from log in to log out. CitiDirect® Commercial Banking brings together Citi’s global products and services into a single digital platform, providing clients with a 360° consolidated view of their Citi banking relationship across Cash, Loans, Trade, FX, Servicing and Onboarding/‘Know Your Client’ (KYC). Since 2023, the platform has continued to evolve to meet the needs of clients and to integrate additional enhancements. These are achieved through the deployment of AI as well as the leveraging of strategic external FinTech partnerships. Enhancements were actioned with the aim of achieving a seamless digital banking experience for mid-sized corporates and integrating client feedback on the platform. “Over the last two years, we’ve seen the platform evolve in new ways to support our clients as they focus on growing their businesses globally. The enhancements support an intuitive and seamless digital experience that delivers real-time insights, greater control and a suite of innovative features. This supports our global strategic goal of digitalizing the banking experience for mid-sized corporates who need to find banking solutions and insights quickly and efficiently.” — Tasnim Ghiawadwala, Global Head of Citi Commercial Bank. Important new enhancements to CitiDirect® Commercial Banking include: AI-powered efficiency and security, with AI-driven automation enhancing both efficiency and security by streamlining data extraction, form filling, client query routing and fraud detection; proactive guidance with ‘next-best-action’ suggestions to guide clients through common tasks, maximizing efficiency and simplifying complex processes; simplified KYC renewals through a ‘one field, one-time’ fully integrated digital KYC process with automated notifications and pre-filled information to simplify renewals, reducing client effort and risk; intuitive user experience improvements driven by data-based analysis of user behavior; streamlined onboarding via a fully digitized process with real-time status updates that significantly reduces turnaround times; seamless Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) integration, where Citi Integrator has reduced ERP implementation time from seven weeks to under an hour, enabling clients to integrate their systems rapidly; and enhanced client service through a new ‘Digital Servicing Hub’ that centralizes client queries, updates and document submission, improving communication and response times. Client feedback on the platform indicates an improved client experience as well as higher satisfaction for ease of use and effectiveness, based on over 10,000 in-platform survey responses. “CitiDirect® Commercial Banking is our vision of how to better serve our mid-sized clients in action. It is a cornerstone of our commitment to their continued success. By prioritizing client needs and leveraging cutting-edge technology, we’re empowering the businesses we work with to focus on what matters most: their growth.” — Mark Sugden, Head of CitiDirect®
Crypto for payments is stifled because decentralization is expensive, and most transactions no longer occur on the base layers (L1s) but on a sprawling ecosystem of high-throughput scaling solutions (L2s)
Stripe is building a high-performance blockchain called “Tempo” to fill a critical gap in its crypto stack, complementing its recent acquisitions of stablecoin startup Bridge and wallet infrastructure provider Privy. Stablecoins promise to make crypto mainstream by delivering faster, cheaper, and more interconnected global payments. However, the same move could undercut what the technology set out to achieve. With the GENIUS Act now law, the next 12-18 months will likely determine the outcome. In the history of technology, the pendulum regularly swings between centralization and decentralization. Once concentration becomes too high, entrepreneurs and developers invent new approaches to reverse it. Bitcoin’s purpose was to break free from centralized intermediaries, and entrepreneurs and developers have applied the same principles to bring decentralization back to other digital platforms. However, progress toward decentralization is mixed, with Bitcoin allowing anyone around the world to be their own bank, while the vast majority of consumers and institutions rely heavily on intermediaries for custody and use. The battle for the future of payments is unfolding now, as legacy infrastructure is siloed and incumbents have tremendous power over what we can access and on what terms. Crypto is a natural, market-driven solution to this, providing neutral and decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether, as well as truly open and interoperable financial rails via their base layers. However, two core problems have emerged: the first problem is that cryptocurrencies are volatile and therefore expensive for payments and financial contracts. To address this, the market has focused on fiat-backed stablecoins, leading to centralization and distributed governance of a stablecoin network. The second problem crypto has run into is that decentralization is expensive, and most transactions no longer occur on the base layers (L1s) but on a sprawling ecosystem of high-throughput scaling solutions (L2s).
Intelligent simulation melds AI, digital twins, quantum computing, spatial computing, and the Internet of Things, to enable organizations to model complex environments, simulate potential attacks, and predict changes to their security posture
Intelligent simulation is a digital technology that offers unprecedented scale and accuracy in modeling and what-if scenarios of physical and digital process systems. It is set to revolutionize security operations by shifting the focus from reactive detection and response to preemptive cybersecurity. By using technologies like AI, digital twins, quantum computing, spatial computing, and the Internet of Things, organizations can model complex environments, simulate potential attacks, and predict changes to their security posture. This approach provides a dynamic and continuous method for risk assessment and offensive security strategies, including penetration testing, red teaming, and bug bounty programs. Cybersecurity product leaders must enable what-now, what-if, and what-next security scenarios by simulating adversarial behaviors to provide continuous risk assessment and empower proactive, preemptive cybersecurity strategies. As intelligent simulation matures, it has the potential to displace some existing adversarial exposure validation products and passive security scanners. However, product leaders must address market education challenges and integrate intelligent simulation seamlessly with existing tools, processes, and frameworks to ensure security controls and remediation strategies deliver the intended outcomes.
Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) Framework spawns real innovation by focusing not on what the customer is using, but what job they are trying to get done
Many of the most impactful innovative changes happen in the seemingly mundane moments of everyday life. Activities like eating or sleeping may not seem as exciting or newsworthy as the latest tech advance, but these are the kinds of activities that affect everyone. Here are practical tools and methods to help: Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) Framework. Ask not what the customer is using, but what job they are trying to get done. Casper used JTBD to learn they were hired to do the job of “effortlessly getting a comfortable bed into my home without the hassle of a showroom.” They innovated the entire product and business model by focusing on the job, not just the product. Customer Safari. Dyson famously found inspiration for its hand dryers in high-speed jet engines. Make customer observation part of onboarding. Let new hires shadow users for a day. Fresh eyes spot what insiders miss. The potential and power of observation are tremendous. Annoyance Audit Practice mindful noticing. Have team members make lists of small annoyances, minor frustrations, inconveniences. It could be tangled cords, awkward backpacks, ineffective gardening tools or grocery bags that tip over. Annoyances and pain points are innovation prompts in disguise. Reverse Innovation. Also known as trickle-up innovation. This is where the process or service is developed in a low-cost, resource-constrained environment, like an emerging market, and then introduced to a developed market. An example is GE’s $800 portable ultrasound. It was developed for rural China and is now widely used in the U.S.
Salesforce’s new CoAct-1 agents gives computer-use agents the ability to execute code while navigating GUIs, that is, writing scripts while also moving a cursor and/or clicking buttons on an application
Researchers at Salesforce and the University of Southern California have developed a new technique that gives computer-use agents the ability to execute code while navigating graphical user interfaces (GUIs), that is, writing scripts while also moving a cursor and/or clicking buttons on an application, combining the best of both approaches to speed up workflows and reduce errors. This hybrid approach allows an agent to bypass brittle and inefficient mouse clicks for tasks that can be better accomplished through coding. The system, called CoAct-1, sets a new state-of-the-art on key agent benchmarks, outperforming other methods while requiring significantly fewer steps to accomplish complex tasks on a computer. The system is structured as a team of three specialized agents that work together: an Orchestrator, a Programmer, and a GUI Operator. The Orchestrator acts as the central planner or project manager. It analyzes the user’s overall goal, breaks it down into subtasks, and assigns each subtask to the best agent for the job. It can delegate backend operations like file management or data processing to the Programmer, which writes and executes Python or Bash scripts. For frontend tasks that require clicking buttons or navigating visual interfaces, it turns to the GUI Operator, a VLM-based agent. After the Programmer or GUI Operator completes a subtask, it sends a summary and a screenshot of the current system state back to the Orchestrator, which then decides the next step or concludes the task. The Programmer agent uses an LLM to generate its code and sends commands to a code interpreter to test and refine its code over multiple rounds. Similarly, the GUI Operator uses an action interpreter that executes its commands (e.g., mouse clicks, typing) and returns the resulting screenshot, allowing it to see the outcome of its actions. The Orchestrator makes the final decision on whether the task should continue or stop. The researchers tested CoAct-1 on OSWorld, a comprehensive benchmark that includes 369 real-world tasks across browsers, IDEs, and office applications. The results show CoAct-1 establishes a new state-of-the-art, achieving a success rate of 60.76%. The performance gains were most significant in categories where programmatic control offers a clear advantage, such as OS-level tasks and multi-application workflows. Beyond just a higher success rate, the system is dramatically more efficient. CoAct-1 solves tasks in an average of just 10.15 steps, a stark contrast to the 15.22 steps required by leading GUI-only agents like GTA-1. The potential for this technology goes beyond general productivity. For enterprise leaders, the key lies in automating complex, multi-tool processes where full API access is a luxury, not a guarantee. Ran Xu, a co-author of the paper and Director of Applied AI Research at Salesforce, points to customer support as a prime example. Xu also sees high-value applications in sales, such as prospecting at scale and automating bookkeeping, and in marketing for tasks like customer segmentation and campaign asset generation.
Ai2 releases an open AI model that allows robots to ‘plan’ movements in 3D space
AI research institute Ai2, the Allen Institute for AI, released MolmoAct 7B, a breakthrough open embodied AI model that brings intelligence to robotics by allowing them to “think” through actions before performing. Ai2 said MolmoAct is the first in a new category of AI models the company is calling an action reasoning model, or ARM, that interprets high-level natural language and then reasons through a plan of physical actions to carry them out in the real world. Unlike current robotics models on the market that operate as vision language action foundation models, ARMs break down instructions into a series of waypoints and actions that take into account what the model can see. “As soon as it sees the world, it lifts the entire world into 3D and then it draws a trajectory to define how its arms are going to move in that space,” Ranjay Krishna, the computer vision team lead at Ai2. “So, it plans for the future. And after it’s done planning, only then does it start taking actions and moving its joints.” Unlike many current models on the market, MolmoAct 7B was trained on a curated open dataset of around 12,000 “robot episodes” from real-world environments, such as kitchens and bedrooms. These demonstrations were used to map goal-oriented actions — such as arranging pillows and putting away laundry. Krishna explained that MolmoAct overcomes this industry transparency challenge by being fully open, providing its code, weights and evaluations, thus resolving the “black box problem.” It is both trained on open data and its inner workings are transparent and openly available. To add even more control, users can preview the model’s planned movements before execution, with its intended motion trajectories overlaid on camera images. These plans can be modified using natural language or by sketching corrections on a touchscreen. This provides a fine-grained method for developers or robotics technicians to control robots in different settings such as homes, hospitals and warehouses. In the SimPLER benchmark, the model achieved state-of-the-art task success rates of 72.1%, beating models from Physical Intelligence, Google LLC, Microsoft Corp. and Nvidia.
Banks accelerate AI deployments as agentic tools gain traction | CIO Dive
Banks ramped up AI adoption as agentic tools began to gain traction in the sector during the first half of the year, according to an Evident Insights’ AI report. The number of new use cases launched by 50 of the world’s largest financial firms doubled compared to the last half of 2024 while the number of technologists working on agentic AI grew more than tenfold, the analysis found. More than half of the 173 use cases deployed by the banks analyzed leveraged generative AI capabilities, Evident said. Nine of the 50 firms documented AI agents in the pilot or production phase, but BNY, Capital One and JPMorgan Chase were the only firms to disclose details of the supporting architecture for agentic workflows. Banks are grappling with twin objectives, according to the report. “They are optimizing potential outcomes from generative AI deployments, while simultaneously assessing early experiments with agentic AI,” Evident said. Banks expect to reap substantial rewards from sustained investments in generative AI capabilities. The technology’s ability to harness vast stores of untapped enterprise data, digest raw documentation and deliver insights that expedite analytics and customer service processes are already transforming daily operations, as developers test the mettle of natural language assistants to ease cumbersome coding tasks. While most of the focus thus far has been directed toward internal use cases, a shift toward the customer is underway. Wells Fargo, for example, beefed up its Fargo virtual banking assistant with Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash and several other smaller internal models, Evident said. The bank is aiming to up its agentic game through an expanded partnership with Google announced earlier this month. Commerzbank leaned on Microsoft’s Azure AI toolkit to roll out AI avatar Ava in April. The app-based assistant answers general banking questions and is designed to provide customers with personalized account information. Ten of the leading banks in the Evident AI Index, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America, have collectively placed AI tools in the hands of over 800,000 employees, representing two-thirds of their workforce. Banks have had the biggest AI wins to date in front office applications and IT and security functions, according to Evident. More than two-thirds of use cases with reported outcomes, including tools that assist sales, were concentrated in these areas.
New York sues Zelle, alleging failure to prevent fraud
Zelle operator Early Warning Services is being sued by New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who alleged that the company fails to protect its users from “massive amounts of fraud.” . An investigation by the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) revealed that EWS designed Zelle without critical safety features, allowing scammers to easily target users and steal over $1 billion between 2017 and 2023. EWS knew from the beginning that key features of the Zelle network made it uniquely susceptible to fraud, and yet it failed to adopt basic safeguards to address these glaring flaws or enforce any meaningful anti-fraud rules on its partner banks. Attorney General James filed this lawsuit after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) abandoned a similar lawsuit, filed in December 2024, following the change in the federal administration. With this lawsuit, Attorney General James is seeking restitution and damages for affected New Yorkers, as well as a court order mandating Zelle maintain anti-fraud measures necessary to protect its users.
Citizens Bank is out to unstick ‘stickiness’
Consumers often stick with a bank or credit union, not because they love their provider, but because it’s just too much work to unhook their life from their checking account and move everything elsewhere. Citizens Bank thinks its new switching service can be the solvent for stickiness, allowing customers to move their entire financial life to Citizens in just a few minutes. Chris Powell, head of deposits and customer engagement at Citizens said, “I want to be your primary bank.” To Powell, that means steady inflow, whether the customer has a single direct deposit coming in twice a month or is a gig worker with 30 direct deposits in that period. The first new functionality, based in the bank’s mobile app, enables the Citizens customer to easily update saved payment methods stored with many popular billers, online retailers and subscription-based goods and services. At the outset, over 70 organizations are tied in, including Amazon, Netflix, Verizon, Lyft and Spotify. The technology, provided through Mastercard’s Finicity subsidiary, not only enables the consumer to connect their Citizens account to the merchant, but behind the scenes it also disconnects the customers’ previous payment arrangement. Each change can be completed in under a minute via the bank’s app. The feature authenticates the switcher through facial identity and a one-time passcode. Citizens says the service will automatically update billers should the accountholder’s debit card be lost or stolen and then replaced. “Doing all of this without the friction of having to remember and type in 20 different usernames and 20 different passwords is really compelling,” says Powell. The second new functionality, also in the bank’s app, addresses direct deposit. It enables accountholders to quickly update where their direct deposits go rather than filing manual paperwork. This is based on direct integration with major payroll companies, making it unnecessary to go through employers’ human resources departments. The two services rely on two open banking solutions provided by Mastercard working in conjunction with Atomic: Bill Pay Switch and Deposit Switch. Powell says the bank is already looking at add-ons to the basic switching service. Powell sees the switching services as a way for Citizens to win good relationships and demonstrate value. He adds that internally the focus is to “aspire to be America’s easiest bank to switch to.” More specifically, he says, the bank sees the switching service as a key component to establishing new relationships. He says the bank is trying to bring the same functionality to the in-branch experience, to help prospects quickly move their business to Citizens. Critical to that strategy, he says, is building in ways to re-engage, because prospects don’t always pull the trigger on a whole new banking relationship right away. Citizens doesn’t have an exclusive on the technology, which means others will eventually take it up or avail themselves of similar approaches