Vonage announced the launch of Vonage Agentforce Identity Insights and Fraud Detection, which provides insights for contact center agents, leveraging AI to help detect fraud risks, verify customers and validate effective communications channels in real time. With Identity Insights, including SIM Swap check powered by Vonage’s Network APIs, Vonage Agentforce Identity Insights and Fraud Detection helps users mitigate fraud across a number of use cases, such as identifying and flagging numbers that have had their SIM recently swapped as potentially fraudulent; validating mobile numbers before sending outbound SMS or making voice calls; and auto verifying phone numbers during lead creation to ensure lead quality. With this solution, organizations can simplify customer engagement and outreach by ensuring number validity so they can prioritize valid accounts, as well as verify number type to target customers with the most effective channel for communications. This rich phone intelligence – including number type, carrier, validity, caller ID name, and SIM swap status – enables contact centers to: Flag potential fraud risks by detecting numbers with recent or multiple SIM swaps and escalating suspicious transactions; Verify customer identities seamlessly by matching caller ID against CRM records, and securing interactions without added friction; Optimize outbound engagement by automating SMS/WhatsApp for mobile devices, while specialist sales teams call landline-only customers; Enhance lead quality by verifying numbers at lead creation to eliminate invalid or outdated details; Deliver proactive notifications by triggering reminders and alerts only on verified numbers, improving engagement rates
Walmart partners with OpenAI to enable Instant Checkout in ChatGPT; ushering in “agentic commerce” where customers chat, plan and buy as AI learns, predicts and automates everyday shopping
Walmart announced a new partnership with OpenAI that will start with allowing customers and members to soon shop Walmart through ChatGPT using Instant Checkout. Whether planning meals, restocking household essentials, or finding something new, customers can simply chat and buy, and Walmart will handle the rest. Walmart described the collaboration as an example of “agentic commerce,” where AI shifts from a reactive tool to a proactive system that learns, plans and predicts, helping customers anticipate their needs before they do. The concept aligns with OpenAI’s goal of enabling agents to assist users across everyday tasks from organizing information to completing purchases all within one interface. This partnership builds on the multiple ways Walmart and Sam’s Club are already using AI, like enhancing product catalogs, improving customer care resolution times and promoting AI literacy among associates. From enhancing the product catalog to reduce fashion production timelines by up to 18 weeks, to ensuring a more seamless shopping journey and cutting customer care resolution times by up to 40%, the company is applying AI so every shopping experience is more convenient and more rewarding. As Walmart defines what’s next for retail, its approach remains the same: people-led and tech-powered, helping people save money and live better.
Visa’s new framework lets merchants verify approved AI agents with no code setup; differentiating trusted agents from bots while enabling personalized experiences and preferred checkout flows
Visa has introduced a tool allowing secure communication between merchants and AI agents. The Trusted Agent Protocol created in partnership with Worldpay and Cloudfare, is designed to address the challenges centered around agent-driven commerce by enabling approved agents to securely pass critical information to merchants. This provides a much-needed framework for recognizing trusted agents with commerce intent and distinguishes them from malicious automation and rogue bots. New specifications use agent-specific cryptographic signatures and includes the following information: Agent Intent – An indication that the agent is a trusted agent with an intent to retrieve additional details about, or purchase, a specific product from a merchant. Consumer Recognition – Data elements that indicate whether a consumer has an existing account or has previously interacted with the merchant. Payment Information – Agents have the option to carry payment data to support a merchant’s preferred checkout or payment method. Jack Forestell, Chief Product & Strategy Officer, Visa said “Our new agent protocol is focused on creating no-code functionality for merchants to securely identify agents with an intent to buy and provide a better payments and personalized experience for its known users.”
Mastercard’s Merchant Cloud will provide merchants with the capability to conduct agentic payments securely, integrating into Mastercard Agent Pay and implementing the latest agentic payments protocols
Mastercard today announced Merchant Cloud, a next-generation payments platform that unifies market-leading services from Mastercard and its partners, helping businesses simplify and navigate the complexities of commerce around the world, supporting their expansion into new markets and delivering exceptional experiences for end users. The platform offers scheme-agnostic solutions for credential tokenization, guest checkout, fraud protection, identity verification, and approval rate optimization. It also provides customers with a variety of gateway services, such as omnichannel experiences, efficient transaction routing, and access to data insights. Combined with dedicated support and easy onboarding, the platform is designed to simplify the life of every partner to easily access the services they need to grow their businesses safely and securely, in an AI enabled world. Merchant Cloud will provide merchants with the capability to conduct agentic payments securely, integrating into Mastercard Agent Pay and implementing the latest agentic payments protocols. Merchant partners can leverage this capability to provide consumers with a seamless and trusted agentic shopping experience. Merchants can tailor a suite of services to improve their optimization performance, including fraud screening services and account lifecycle updates. Additionally, Merchant Cloud incorporates AI to streamline shopping and to help improve approval rates. Mastercard’s Security Solutions within Merchant Cloud include advanced cyber, identity, and AI fraud monitoring tools designed to identify fraudulent merchants, providing risk scores to acquirers, payment service providers and payment facilitators. The Transaction Risk API analyzes client-provided data to provide payment operations teams with risk scores and actionable insights to manage global fraud and enhance customer experience.
Semantic Similarity Ranking creates LLM generated synthetic consumer “digital twins” whose rating distributions match human panels; delivering qualitative rationales and preserving survey metrics to test products and ads in hours instead of weeks
A new research paper outlines semantic similarity rating (SSR); a breakthrough method that allows large language models (LLMs) to simulate human consumer behavior with startling accuracy, a development that could reshape the multi-billion-dollar market research industry. The technique promises to create armies of synthetic consumers who can provide not just realistic product ratings, but also the qualitative reasoning behind them, at a scale and speed currently unattainable. Instead of asking an LLM for a number, SSR prompts the model for a rich, textual opinion on a product. This text is then converted into a numerical vector — an “embedding” — and its similarity is measured against a set of pre-defined reference statements. The results are striking. Tested against a massive real-world dataset from a leading personal care corporation — comprising 57 product surveys and 9,300 human responses — the SSR method achieved 90% of human test-retest reliability. Crucially, the distribution of AI-generated ratings was statistically almost indistinguishable from the human panel. The authors state, “This framework enables scalable consumer research simulations while preserving traditional survey metrics and interpretability.” The success of the SSR method suggests its embeddings effectively capture the nuances of purchase intent. For this new technique to be widely adopted, enterprises will need to be confident that the underlying models are not just generating plausible text, but are mapping that text to scores in a way that is robust and meaningful. The approach also represents a significant leap from prior research, which has largely focused on using text embeddings to analyze and predict ratings from existing online reviews. The ability to spin up a “digital twin” of a target consumer segment and test product concepts, ad copy, or packaging variations in a matter of hours could drastically accelerate innovation cycles. As the paper notes, these synthetic respondents also provide “rich qualitative feedback explaining their ratings,” offering a treasure trove of data for product development that is both scalable and interpretable. While the era of human-only focus groups is far from over, this research provides the most compelling evidence yet that their synthetic counterparts are ready for business.
Nacha updates International ACH Transactions (IAT) rules to boost cross border efficiency; adding date of birth for sanctions screening, clarified IAT definition and mandatory IAT contacts
Nacha voting members approved five Nacha Operating Rules changes aimed at increasing the awareness and efficiency of International ACH Transactions, or IATs. “The U.S. ACH Network has supported the capability to send and receive cross-border ACH payments for decades,” said Jane Larimer, Nacha President and CEO. “These Rules changes should make IATs easier and more efficient to use.” The existing Nacha Rules for IATs became effective in 2009, replacing previous cross-border ACH payments with a new transaction rule set and format that enabled compliance with the Travel Rule and Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanction programs. Approximately 121 million IATs were made in 2024. One of the approved Rules refines the definition of an IAT with the goal of making it easier for ACH Originators and Originating Depository Financial Institutions (ODFIs) to determine whether a payment should be classified as an IAT. The other approved Rules are aimed at transaction and data efficiency. They include adding the capability to carry a person’s date of birth for sanctions screening; adding a new return reason to indicate an issue with sanctions screening as distinct from other return reasons; recognizing the possibility that the financial agency outside the U.S. is a non-traditional account-holding institution or organization; and requiring U.S. financial institutions to register IAT-specific contacts in Nacha’s ACH Contact Registry.
Verifone launches Commander Fleet to accept WEX and other fleet cards through a single POS; unifying heavy/light fleet and consumer transactions along with fleet data capture like odometer readings
Verifone announced the launch of Commander Fleet, a first-of-its-kind solution enabling existing Verifone customers to accept both WEX® and other leading commercial fleet (fuel) cards through a single POS integration. Commander Fleet consolidates fleet acceptance into one streamlined POS system, delivering significant operational efficiencies and a better experience for drivers. Powered by the trusted Verifone Commander platform, Commander Fleet supports heavy fleet, light fleet, and consumer transactions on one system, while meeting all required fleet-specific data capture needs, such as odometer readings. For unbranded sites, the solution integrates with Commander Payments, providing a complete payments package without added infrastructure. By unifying fleet card processing, operators gain: Lower total cost of ownership – One device for all fleet and consumer card payments. Eliminates duplicate hardware, licenses, and service contracts—delivering measurable, long-term savings. Operational efficiency & faster throughput – A single, streamlined POS reduces toggling and checkout friction. Faster transactions move more trucks through the line and create more upsell opportunities. Simplified training & higher productivity – One system for all transactions means shorter employee training times, fewer errors, and smoother operations at every register. Unified reporting & actionable insights – A single view of all WEX activity enables faster reconciliation, smarter staffing, and data-driven promotions. Future-ready flexibility – Built on the Commander platform for easy expansion as fleet networks evolve—protecting your investment for years to come.
ExaGrid’s multi-layer Retention Time-Lock for ransomware recovery protects backup data from deletion or encryption by combining a non-network-facing Repository Tier, tiered air gap, delayed delete policy and immutable data objects
ExaGrid announced the release of a new AI-Powered RTL feature: Auto Detect & Guard. The Auto Detect & Guard feature monitors all daily operational deletes, trains/learns, and creates patterns. If a delete request is outside of the pattern, the customer’s IT team is alerted and ExaGrid automatically extends the delayed delete policy so data in the Repository Tier is never deleted. If the delete was an operational delete, the IT team can clear the alert and ExaGrid will return to the original delayed delete policy. This provides two benefits: an early warning of a possible cyber attack where the attackers are trying to delete the backup data and ensuring that the backup data is not deleted on ExaGrid’s non-network-facing Repository Tier. ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage appliances have a network-facing disk-cache Landing Zone where the most recent backups are stored in an undeduplicated format for fast backup and restore performance. Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing tier called the Repository Tier, for longer-term retention. ExaGrid’s unique architecture and features provide comprehensive security including Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery, and through the combination of a non-network-facing tier (creating a tiered air gap), a delayed delete policy, and immutable data objects, backup data is protected from being deleted or encrypted. ExaGrid’s offline tier is ready for recovery in the event of an attack. Summary of ExaGrid’s AI-Powered RTL features: Auto Detect & Guard; Delayed delete policy; Immutable data objects; Non-network-facing tier – a tiered air gap; Alert on encrypted data; Two-factor authentication; Dual role – admin and security roles
Capital One’s AirKey turns credit and debit cards into NFC hardware authenticators across 100 million cards; using risk sloping and tap-based verification to replace vulnerable SMS one-time pins
Novel threat vectors, like deepfakes, synthetic identity fraud and phishing powered by powerful language models, were once the province of science fiction. But generative artificial intelligence is opening them up as a constant reality. Particularly for banks and financial institutions, resilience is an operating principle. “One of the most important things for financial institutions and banks is first building flexible authentication systems that allow us to react dynamically as these new fraud vectors appear,” Kaye-Kauderer said. “And second, having a really broad set of authentication tools, a really big toolkit.” At Capital One, the AirKey product that Kaye-Kauderer leads sits squarely in that toolkit. “AirKey is a technology that turns credit cards or debit cards into hardware authenticators,” she said, adding that AirKey has already scaled across more than 100 million cards. “For a consumer, they can take out their credit card or debit card, they can tap it to their phone, and through that tap, they prove possession of their card and they authenticate with their financial institution.” It may sound deceptively simple. You tap your card to your phone and authenticate instantly. However, the impact is crucial in accelerating the shift away from comparatively more vulnerable channels like SMS one-time pins, which have long been exploited by fraudsters through SIM swaps and phishing. At Capital One, the answer is what the company calls risk sloping, an approach that gauges the risk of a transaction up front and applies authentication proportionally. “As we introduce more authentication tools and we give customers more choice, we actually tend to see that they’re more successful in completing the authentication,” Kaye-Kauderer said. AirKey sits alongside SMS, government identity verification, mobile app verification and more, she said. The idea is not to crown a single winner but to maintain a diverse arsenal that can be deployed as threats evolve.
ZoraSafe app protects older people online by- scanning QR codes for malware, analyzing suspicious SMS/emails, detecting deepfake phone calls, building a crowdsourced scam database with gamified microlearning for seniors
ZoraSafe is an app that not only protects older people against scammers and hackers, but also teaches them how to stay safe through gamified microlearning. The app is expected to be launched in a month. It will cost $12.99 a month for individual subscribers, and a higher rate for family and group plans. The first version of the app will have several features, such as a mode to scan QR codes for malware or phishing, the ability to send suspicious SMS text messages and emails to ZoraSafe to get them checked out, and a feature to share a known scam or threat with the app so it can be added to a database to help other users. Future releases will also include a feature that will allow users to get ZoraSafe to join a suspicious phone call, so the company’s AI system can detect if it’s a scam or a deepfake call. In that case, however, the app will not be listening to or recording the calls. Once the app detects a threat, it will spin up a chat that will explain to the user what that threat was and teach them how to spot and deal with similar situations in the future. The AI engine is designed with privacy in mind, doing 85% of the processing on the device, and only 15% in the cloud, which will be “sanitized of your personal information before it leaves your device.” Therea re also plans to make an “NFC sticker” that will be incorporated in phone cases so that users can quickly pull up the app if they get a deepfake call, or even if they fall and need to alert their caretakers. That’s one of the ways they plan on getting around iOS’s restrictions on apps monitoring what happens on other apps. Another way is to have a “Share to ZoraSafe” option in the iOS menu that will allow users to send text messages or emails to the company’s systems.