Voice-based AI agents are advancing to such a degree that they are now outperforming call centers and beginning to replace human labor in industries from healthcare to retail, according to venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Making voice programmable means AI can now interpret, respond to and act on voiced queries with more accuracy and reliability. Moore said voice AI lets businesses respond to customers 24/7 instead of having to wait until an office is staffed. For consumers, “We believe voice will be the first — and perhaps primary — way people interact with AI.” Last year, voice AI startups raised $2.1 billion, up eightfold from 2023, according to research firm CB Insights. The 2024 bumper crop included ElevenLabs’ $180 million fundraising round. Growth was driven by advances in voice AI models — such as OpenAI’s Realtime API for speech-to-speech applications — that gave a big boost to applications in various use cases. “It’s really in the last 12 to 18 months that we’ve seen AI voice agents performing as well or better than humans,” Alex Levin, co-founder and CEO of voice AI company Regal, told. A year ago, OpenAI unveiled a “voice mode” built on top of GPT-4o that offered real-time voice responsiveness, the ability to be interrupted, and a diversity in emotional tones rather than robotic responses. ElevenLabs followed with Conversational AI in November, with version 2.0 coming out last month. Meanwhile, players like Kyutai and Speechmatics brought real-time, full-duplex conversations into production, Moore said. These models also became more affordable as latency dropped. OpenAI cut GPT-4o API costs by up to 87.5% last December, according to Moore.
Stablecoins fuel $36 billion in B2B payments as issuers eye mature markets
Stablecoins are gaining traction in B2B payments, offering speed, cost-efficiency and U.S. dollar stability. They represent an emerging reality across emerging markets. Annualized at $36 billion as of February, B2B transactions are no longer just theoretical experiments but are serving as critical plumbing for modern financial flows. The total stablecoin volume over that same period was $94 billion, meaning that B2B transactions now make up the largest segment of stablecoin payment volumes, surpassing even peer-to-peer transfers and card-linked spending. where stablecoin B2B payments are thriving is where banking can often fail. Latin America and Africa, in particular, are hubs of real-world adoption. In Brazil and Colombia, platforms like Bitso and Conduit have enabled faster euro and U.S. dollar settlement, replacing clunky wire networks. In Kenya and Ghana, businesses use stablecoins to sidestep currency devaluation and cross-border delays. “Stablecoins are a great way to transfer value,” Conduit CEO Kirill Gertman told. BVNK and LianLian Global partnered to enable merchants to use major stablecoins to fund cross-border transactions illustrates, crypto continues pushing forward with innovations designed to streamline corporate spending. PayPal used its own native stablecoin to pay EY, while the President Donald Trump family’s new stablecoin was reportedly used for a $2 billion investment into Binance by Abu Dhabi’s MGX.
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New bill requires the SBA report on the performance of and risk associated with 7(a) loans generated through loan agent activity, to combat fraud and improve transparency
The House of Representatives passed legislation that its sponsor said will combat fraud and improve transparency in a Small Business Administration (SBA) loan program. The legislation, the 7(a) Loan Agent Oversight Act (H.R. 1804), requires the SBA’s Office of Credit Risk Management to provide Congress with an annual report on the performance of and risk associated with SBA 7(a) loans generated through loan agent activity. The bill passed on a vote of 405 to 3, with two Republicans and one Democrat voting against it. The legislation was received in the Senate Wednesday (June 4) and referred to the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. The data in the report required by the legislation will enable Congress to oversee the loan program, which the SBA’s Inspector General found has seen over $335 million in documented loan agent fraud. “My bill ensures that both Congress and the SBA have the necessary data to provide proper oversight by requiring the SBA’s Office of Credit Risk Management to collect and report on fraudulent loans, default rates, and risk analysis of loan agents operating within the program,” Rep. Dan Meuser, R-Pa. said. “Strengthening transparency and accountability will protect taxpayer dollars, ensure the 7(a) Loan Program remains a successful public-private partnership, and help small businesses continue to access the capital they need to grow.”
JPMorganChase announces new Corporate Responsibility impact strategy advancing s financial health and wellness for traditionally underserved LMI communities by building stability, supporting resilience and creating & protecting wealth
JPMorganChase announced a new Corporate Responsibility impact strategy aimed at bolstering financial health and economic growth in communities across the U.S., particularly those living on low- and moderate-incomes (LMI). The firm will use this strategy to enhance its commitments to advancing financial health and wellness for traditionally underserved LMI communities through new engagements and commitments across philanthropic and impact finance capital, policy advocacy, research and community partnerships. The new strategy is focused on three key financial health components – financial stability, financial resilience, and wealth building and protection – and is informed by lessons learned through $100 million in philanthropic and impact finance commitments deployed over the past three years, as well as successes realized across the consumer bank in tailoring products and services to community needs. At EMERGE Financial Health Conference in San Diego, the firm released detailed lessons learned through its past philanthropic and impact finance investments as well as business successes, which have included increased market share, savings account growth, and improved credit scores in historically underserved LMI communities. These lessons are part of a new report, Advancing Financial Health for Americans, available here. Informed by these insights, the new strategy is designed to address unique challenges faced by historically underserved LMI communities and centered on three key phases to support individuals at every stage of their financial health journey: Building financial stability to ensure individuals can manage their day-to-day financial lives with ease, which is foundational to realizing bigger financial goals.
New Moody’s Analytics report echoes Jamie Dimon in warning that private credit could be a “locus of contagion” in a downturn
A new Moody’s Analytics report warns that private credit could be a “locus of contagion” in a downturn. The concerns echo past criticisms of the booming industry from JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon. The report raised concerns about what it called the industry’s growing “interconnections” across industries from banking to insurance. “The same institutional investors, say an insurance company or a sovereign wealth fund, might hold stakes in private credit funds, CLOs, and public corporate bonds,” the report said, adding:”If losses occur in one investment, that investor may be forced to liquidate assets elsewhere, propagating stress.” Dimon said that there “could be hell to pay” if the private credit sector falters, saying it reminds him a “little bit” of the mortgage industry. Private credit investors, like Apollo CEO Marc Rowan, have argued that the new model is actually making the financial system safer. “Jamie is an amazing representative of the banking industry,” “But every dollar that moves out of the banking industry and into the investment marketplace makes the system safer and more resilient and less levered.” The private credit industry is still much smaller than banking, and does “not yet appear to be systemically important,” the report said, adding that “it could disproportionately amplify a future crisis.” The report listed regulatory recommendations that could soften the potential impact of a private-credit crisis, such as increased stress-testing of large funds, transparency and data reporting, and limits or guidelines on leverage at certain funds. In other words: Make private credit funds a bit more like banks. “The objective is not to stifle the beneficial innovation that private credit provides but to shine a light on its risks and linkages so that a rapidly growing part of corporate finance, and potentially other sectors, does not become a blind spot,” the report said.
BMO hires Aron Levine as group head and president of U.S. businesses; Mat Mehrotra, who is currently chief digital officer will join the executive committee
BMO Financial Group is shuffling leadership roles in its North American personal and business banking group and hiring a longtime Bank of America executive to oversee three stateside businesses. Aron Levine will serve as group head and president of BMO U.S. He will lead the company’s U.S. personal and business banking, commercial banking and wealth management units, the bank said. Levine will join BMO’s executive committee and its U.S. management group. He will be based in Chicago, where BMO’s U.S. operations are headquartered, and he will report to BMO CEO Darryl White and BMO U.S. CEO Darrel Hackett. Levine’s hiring is one of several executive changes that BMO announced Thursday, most of which will become effective on July 7. They appear to be driven at least in part by the pending retirement of Erminia “Ernie” Johannson, the head of BMO’s North American personal and business banking group since 2020. Johannson plans to step down from that role in early 2026, the bank said. Johannson, a frequent American Banker Most Powerful Women in Banking honoree who was No. 9 on last year’s list, has played a key role in BMO’s U.S. expansion, most recently leading the 2023 integration of the company’s acquisition of Bank of the West. The deal catapulted BMO into the ranks of the top 20 banks in the nation based on assets. With Johannson’s expected exit, BMO is divvying up her responsibilities. Sharon Haward-Laird will be promoted to group head of Canadian commercial banking and North American shared services, as well as co-head of Canadian personal and commercial banking. Mat Mehrotra will become group head of Canadian personal and business banking, and will join Haward-Laird as co-head of Canadian personal and commercial banking, according to the company. Haward-Laird is currently BMO’s general counsel and will remain on the company’s executive committee after starting in her new role. Mehrotra, who is currently BMO’s chief digital officer and head of Canadian products, will join the executive committee. They both will report to White. Nadim Hirji will be promoted to vice chair of BMO commercial banking. Hirji has overseen BMO’s North American commercial banking business since 2023. His new role will focus on growth initiatives in commercial banking in Canada and the U.S. Mona Malone, BMO’s chief human resources officer and a member of the executive committee, will gain the additional title of chief administrative officer. Malone will lead marketing, communications, human resources, corporate estate and procurement. She will report to White and also serve on the U.S. management committee. Paul Noble, who is currently BMO’s chief legal officer, will succeed Haward-Laird as general counsel and become group head of legal and regulatory compliance. He will join BMO’s executive committee and report to White.
KeyBank’s clients have expressed interest in a variety of digital currencies and stablecoins and mostly they want KeyBank to hold those assets
The largest banks are moving ahead with stablecoins. JPMorganChase was first with JPM Coin, which is pegged to the U.S. dollar and used to process $1 billion of payments daily. Bank of America has said it’s planning to offer a fiat-backed stablecoin. Citi already has digital tokens it uses to transfer money internally across geographies; it is said to be considering issuing its own stablecoin as well. Many smaller banks laid plans for bitcoin custody a few years ago; those plans were kiboshed by regulators, and the banks remain gun-shy. Executives at Pathward and KeyBank both said their customers are asking about digital assets. “We’ve seen a lot of demand for stablecoin, especially as it relates to business to business and business to consumer payments, especially cross border use cases,” said Will Sowell, divisional president of banking as a service at Pathward Bank. “Our approach has been to build on ramps and off ramps for that. As a sponsor bank, there’s a large opportunity to participate.” KeyBank’s clients have expressed interest in a variety of digital currencies. Mostly they want KeyBank to hold those assets, according to Bennie Pennington, senior vice president, embedded finance at KeyBank. Leaders at Royal Business Bank and Piermont Bank struck a more cautious note. “We are monitoring the digital asset space,” said Rodrigo Suarez, chief banking officer at Piermont Bank. “We’re not necessarily planning anything specific right now. We need to make sure that what we’re doing is relevant, but not necessarily just following a trend.” Gary Fan, chief operating officer at Royal Business Bank, also said his bank is monitoring the digital asset space. “We have to see how the regulatory agencies play out,” Fan said. “We do have the regulatory agencies above us, and more or less those people are uncomfortable. It’s very, very difficult for us to enter new areas like that. For us specifically, we’re looking at it, but it’s probably not one of the top one or two priorities that we’re going to work on in the next 12 months.” Dara Tarkowski, managing partner at Actuate Law, said a wait-and-see approach makes sense from a legal perspective. “When you have a lack of a true regulatory framework, and you still have states breathing down your neck, banks need to always go to find their own true North Star,” she said. Banks need to go back to safety and soundness principles, and create policies and procedures that will safeguard customers, she said.
Morgan Stanley launches NIL “name, image and likeness” financial education program to explore some of the complex planning questions that come with NIL pay to student athletes
Morgan Stanley Global Sports & Entertainment and “name, image and likeness” technology and management firm TheLinkU are teaming up with National Collegiate Athletic Association conferences and university athletic departments to deliver financial education to student athletes. The program is launching as the compensation for athletes ranging from thousands of dollars to several million is leading to more efforts to boost financial literacy and explore some of the complex planning questions that come with NIL pay. And the rules governing that compensation — which has already shaken up college sports — may soon look much different, based on a current lawsuit. The involvement of Morgan Stanley was “really important for me and for the athletes, because it gives instant credibility,” since both the wealth management company’s unit and TheLinkU aim to give the players “the tools to be successful,” said founder Austin Elrod. His firm works with athletes, athletic departments and colleges to maximize their NIL through identification of opportunities, contract management technology and other services. The education could turn into client relationships for the Morgan Stanley advisors and executives coaching the students if “the athletes determine that they would like to take the next steps,” Elrod said. NIL payments have created something of a “wild wild west” for athletes who have, in some cases, been receiving large checks since the NCAA legalized the compensation in 2021, according to Pat Brown, a wealth manager in Creative Planning and the founder of Financial Literacy for Student Athletes. At the same time, the athletes are fielding interest from so-called agents or NIL firms demanding much higher commissions from them than those received by agents representing professional sports players, he noted. Brown, a former NCAA football player who became an advisor, speaks with college athletes and coaches them on financial topics on a pro bono basis. An environment of growing overtures to the players from licensed experts and potential bad actors alike “forces the younger student-athlete to do their due diligence, sooner rather than later,” Brown said. And they have valid concerns about what will happen if they, like most NCAA athletes, can’t play their sport professionally, he added. To that point, some aspects of NIL could see dramatic shifts in the rules for the compensation based on the pending settlement in the House v. NCAA case, a lawsuit filed by former student athletes over the revenue colleges receive from the broadcast rights to the sports. As many as 390,000 current and former athletes could get back payments amounting to $2.77 billion, and every Division I school could then share up to $20.5 million in media revenue with athletes from their colleges, starting on July 1. Any future NIL deals over $600 would need approval from a third-party clearinghouse deciding whether the contracts represent the “fair market value.” But the agreement between the parties hasn’t received final approval from the judge in the case. And legislative action by Congress or an executive order from the White House could alter the guidelines further. In that murky landscape, the more than 300 Morgan Stanley advisors in the sports and entertainment unit could offer the athletes some valuable financial education and advice. And that will be especially true after the terms of the House settlement will “allow billions of dollars to flow to student athletes from institutions,” said Elrod. Currently, the firms are planning advisors’ trips to speak with teams from three conferences — the Big 12, the Mid-American Conference (MAC) and Conference-USA — with more possible agreements on the way. Regardless of the complex negotiations ongoing over possible limits on NCAA rosters or future laws, advisors should educate themselves about the ramifications of the settlement and how working with college athletes is different from planning for pro sports players, he said.
Study shows GPT-style models have a fixed memorization capacity of approximately 3.6 bits per parameter and training on more data forces models to memorize less per-sample is helping to reduce privacy risk
A new study from researchers at Meta, Google DeepMind, Cornell University, and NVIDIA finds that GPT-style models have a fixed memorization capacity of approximately 3.6 bits per parameter. One key takeaway from the research is that models do not memorize more when trained on more data. Instead, a model’s fixed capacity is distributed across the dataset, meaning each individual datapoint receives less attention. Jack Morris, the lead author, explained via the social network X that “training on more data will force models to memorize less per-sample.” These findings may help ease concerns around large models memorizing copyrighted or sensitive content. If memorization is limited and diluted across many examples, the likelihood of reproducing any one specific training example decreases. In essence, more training data leads to safer generalization behavior, not increased risk. To precisely quantify how much language models memorize, the researchers used an unconventional but powerful approach: they trained transformer models on datasets composed of uniformly random bitstrings. Each of these bitstrings was sampled independently, ensuring that no patterns, structure, or redundancy existed across examples. Because each sample is unique and devoid of shared features, any ability the model shows in reconstructing or identifying these strings during evaluation directly reflects how much information it retained—or memorized—during training. This method allows the researchers to map a direct relationship between the number of model parameters and the total information stored. By gradually increasing model size and training each variant to saturation, across hundreds of experiments on models ranging from 500K to 1.5 billion parameters, they observed consistent results: 3.6 bits memorized per parameter, which they report as a fundamental measure of LLM memory capacity. The study also examined how model precision—comparing training in bfloat16 versus float32—affects memorization capacity. They observed a modest increase from 3.51 to 3.83 bits-per-parameter when switching to full 32-bit precision. However, this gain is far less than the doubling of available bits would suggest, implying diminishing returns from higher precision. The paper proposes a scaling law that relates a model’s capacity and dataset size to the effectiveness of membership inference attacks. These attacks attempt to determine whether a particular data point was part of a model’s training set. The research shows that such attacks become unreliable as dataset size grows, supporting the argument that large-scale training helps reduce privacy risk. By introducing a principled and quantifiable definition of memorization, the study gives developers and researchers new tools for evaluating the behavior of language models. This helps not only with model transparency but also with compliance, privacy, and ethical standards in AI development. The findings suggest that more data—and not less—may be the safer path when training large-scale language models.
Theta Lake’s solution can detect and report the presence of AI assistants in meetings, identify confidential data exposed in AI content and detect missing disclaimers and disclosures in AI content
Theta Lake’s AI Governance and Inspection Suite is designed to address these challenges and go beyond the scoping and access control guardrails built into the leading AI tools. Specifically, detecting and reporting the presence of AI assistants in meetings; providing a flexible way to decide which summaries are captured and how they are retained; and the ability to specifically inspect AI generated content for conduct, compliance, or data protection risks that may require supervision action, user governance, remediation, and / or adjustment of data access, scoping and related guardrails in the AI tools themselves. Theta Lake’s suite of modules are purpose-built into Unified Communications & Collaboration integrations and their AI suites. This makes it seamless to adopt both the UCC suite, its AI capabilities, and Theta Lake’s additional governance and inspection capabilities, all without complex service engagements or lengthy deployment models. The Theta Lake AI Governance and Inspection Suite has three core modules including: AI Assistant & Notetaker Detection Module; Zoom AI Companion Inspection Module and Microsoft Copilot Inspection Module. The Theta Lake AI Governance and Inspection Suite and modules enable organizations to: Identify confidential data exposed in AI content; Detect missing disclaimers and disclosures in AI content; Recognize AI tools used in communication and collaboration interactions; Insert user notifications into conversations around the use of AI tools; Remediate AI content in conversations; Notify, send training info, and document / prove notifications for compliance; Selective capture, analysis, and retention options for AI content; Seamlessly deploy in parallel with their UCC tools.