Scammers opened a JPMorgan Chase bank account and scammed at least one victim in the United States through a clone of Exante, a brokerage firm that does not even offer services in that country. The victim transferred the funds to the scammers via that JPMorgan Chase account, according to the (real) Exante. “They managed to open real accounts with JPMorgan Chase using a US address and also opened a few crypto wallets,” Natalia Taft, Head of Compliance at Exante told. “They set up these channels to collect money from their victims.” The routing and account number belong to a JP Morgan Chase account. This shows how sophisticated scammers have become. Although it remains unknown how they have opened the JPMorgan Chase account, it must be pointed out that Gen AI has become a tool for many fraudsters. The scammers even “replicated the trading board” of Exante. Although the fake website mentioned Exante’s Cyprus address, it targeted US clients. The real Exante does not offer trading services to US clients. After receiving deposits from the victim, the scammers even registered the victim on the real Exante platform.
Banks tap affiliate marketing to grow digital-first products by connecting with highly targeted, intent-driven audiences and paying only by results
Affiliate marketing has matured into one of the financial service industry’s most reliable customer-acquisition channels. Banks and credit unions have come to value the affiliate channel for its ability to drive growth in deposit accounts, credit card investment and other products, but also for the precision by which its results can be measured. In most cases clients pay only for proven relationships, accounts opened or sales closed. When Bank Iowa in West Des Moines wanted to expand the reach of its deposit gathering beyond its core footprint, it turned to a CD Valet, a digital marketplace with an affiliate program that lets online depositors shop banks’ certificate of deposit offerings. Bank Iowa posted its rates on the site. The tactic has contributed to the institution doubling its CD portfolio over the past three years, to $615 million on Dec. 31. Marketing Director Josh Fleming called Bank Iowa’s partnership with CD Valet “one of our shiniest examples of an affiliate program that’s working well.” “When they work right, [affiliate] partnerships help banks establish relationships with high-target prospects they may not otherwise have been able to reach, and all without having to carry a ton of overhead costs,” Fleming told “You see a lot of digital marketing where people pay for just an impression or a click,” Sarah Carroll, marketing director at the Live Oak Bancshares in Wilmington, North Carolina, said. “This way, you can pay for an actual sale or account opening — something that actually flows through to a banking relationship.” Affiliate marketing has “become a cornerstone of performance strategy for financial services providers,” Christena Garduno, CEO at marketing agency Media Culture, said. “The ability to connect with highly targeted, intent-driven audiences through trusted publishers, creators and platforms has made affiliate marketing not just a complementary tactic, but a key driver of growth.” Kaveh Vadat, founder and President of RiseOpp, a fintech that offers fractional Chief Marketing Officer services, said, “People clicking through these channels are often comparison shopping, which means they’re further along in the decision-making process.” Today, affiliate marketing is a big business. U.S. companies of all types, including financial services providers, are projected to spend $12 billion on affiliate marketing in 2025, with outlays expected to grow to $16 billion by 2028, according to eMarketer. Use of affiliated marketing to date has tilted toward the retail side, according to Vadat. In addition to CDs and other deposit products, it has become a go-to strategy for credit cards, personal loans and investment robo advisors. “These products tend to be digital-first, which aligns well with how affiliate traffic behaves,” Vadat said. Echoing Vadat, Live Oak’s Carroll said consumer usage has outpaced that of business, though that imbalance “seems to be leveling out.” More and more institutions “are seeing the value of adding conversations and information around the business side, even if they had traditionally focused on [consumer content],” Carroll said. Even as its use becomes more widespread, Carroll doesn’t think affiliate marketing will displace traditional marketing mediums such as radio, television, print or even billboards. “All banks are probably going to be in those spaces. I don’t think they’re going away,” she said.
Most Coachella attendees this year opted to use the festival’s installment payment plan, akin to BNPL
Bypassing traditional buy now, pay later (BNPL) providers, Coachella’s payment plans have become especially popular with the festival’s mostly younger crowd—and a significant revenue source for its promoters. According to reporting from Billboard, approximately 60% of general admission ticket buyers at this year’s festival opted to use Coachella’s payment plan. Buyers are charged a $41 upfront fee to enroll. With nearly 100,000 attendees expected, that fee alone generates more than $4 million, split between the ticketing company and the promoter. In a sense, that $41 may seem minor compared to the overall cost—general admission tickets for the three-day festival started at $499, plus fees. The payment plan allows attendees to get started with as little as $19.99, with the balance spread out over several months. For Coachella, that generally means the three-month stretch between the January lineup announcement and the festival itself. The use of these payment plans is soaring despite increased competition from traditional BNPL firms like Klarna and Affirm. With those providers, payments are generally made after the consumer has received their goods or services, and there are no fees. Coachella attendees must complete their payments prior to the festival. If they miss a scheduled payment, they have 10 days to bring their account current, or their ticket order is cancelled. However, the attendee does receive a credit toward next year’s festival. Coachella first began offering installment plans in 2009, with just 18% of attendees opting in at the time. Since then, that number has grown significantly. However, with the rise of BNPL plans, promoters may soon face increased competition. “BNPL plans offering 0% interest and no fee loans will usurp any prepay plans requiring an upfront fee,” said Ben Danner, Senior Analyst of Credit and Commercial at Javelin Strategy & Research. “Especially with a festival like Coachella, which attracts a younger demographic who are already using BNPL.”
Amazon’s new voice processing model understands intent, tone, inflection, and pacing even if they mumble, misspeak, or are in a noisy setting and is 47% more accurate than OpenAI’s GPT-4o-
Amazon debuted a new generative AI model, Nova Sonic, capable of natively processing voice and generating natural-sounding speech. Nova Sonic is available through Bedrock via a new bi-directional streaming API. Nova Sonic is “the most cost-efficient” AI voice model on the market, and around 80% less expensive than OpenAI’s GPT-4o. Compared to rival AI voice models, Nova Sonic excels at routing user requests to different APIs. This capability helps Nova Sonic “know” when it needs to fetch real-time information from the internet, parse a proprietary data source, or take action in an external application — and use the appropriate tool to do it. During a two-way dialogue, Nova Sonic waits to speak “at the appropriate time,” taking into account a speaker’s pauses and interruptions, says Amazon. It also generates a text transcript for the user’s speech, which developers can use for various applications. Nova Sonic is less prone to speech recognition errors than other AI voice models meaning the model is relatively good at understanding a user’s intent even if they mumble, misspeak, or are in a noisy setting. On a benchmark measuring speech recognition across languages and dialects, Multilingual LibriSpeech, Amazon says Nova Sonic achieved a word error rate (WER) of just 4.2% when averaged across English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. That means that roughly four out of every 100 words from the model differed from a human transcription in those languages. On another benchmark measuring loud interactions with multiple participants, Augmented Multi Party Interaction, Amazon says Nova Sonic was 46.7% more accurate in terms of WER than OpenAI’s GPT-4o-transcribe model. Nova Sonic also has industry-leading speed, with an average perceived latency of 1.09 seconds, according to Amazon. That makes it faster than the GPT-4o model powering OpenAI’s Realtime API, which responds in 1.18 seconds, per benchmarking by Artificial Analysis.
Apple Store in Germany rolls out “Request to Pay” that allows customers to pay directly from their bank account, but leaves them with immediate debit card costs and no chargeback protection
Apple has introduced a new payment option in its German online store, “Request to Pay” (R2P), which allows customers to pay directly from their bank account. This procedure is implemented with Deutsche Bank and comes with some disadvantages for customers, but Apple sees its money faster. The procedure allows customers to place orders in the shopping cart, select “Bank transfer”, and enter their IBAN account details. Deutsche Bank receives personal data for the “provision of these services” and has implemented the procedure for a three-digit number of retailers. However, R2P has potential disadvantages, such as immediate debit card costs and potential delay in chargebacks in case of returns or other problems. Customers can expect a quick return amount, but credit card payments have up to one month to transfer money, depending on the payment period. Consumer protection offers are also critical of R2P, with some suggesting that transfers should only be made when goods have already been received or using payment methods with additional protection, such as chargeback or buyer protection.
Fintech PayDo turns business account management into a group activity allowing owners to assign role-based permissions, verify users and streamline approval chains
Fintech PayDo has launched Team Members feature to help companies manage financial operations collaboratively. A step up from one business account per company, this feature now allows businesses to get all hands on deck with hundreds of employees gaining access to one dashboard at no detriment to its performance, for greater control, security, and efficiency. The new feature allows account owners to assign role-based permissions, verify users, streamline approval chains, and stay informed in real time—all within a single PayDo Business Account. In addition to turning business account management into a group activity for financial teams, the Team Members Feature brings a suite of advanced user-management tools and capabilities: Add and Manage Team Members, Secure Verification, Role-Based Access, Compare Roles, Approval Workflows, Real-Time Notifications, Scalability. PayDo’s feature aims to automate and simplify access to sensitive financial tools in multi-user environments without compromising the speed or safety of the entire infrastructure. Team Members Feature promises to deliver this by: Enabling permission control to match organizational responsibilities; Increasing operational security through verified access; Supporting efficiency and transparency with real-time updates; Providing a scalable solution for small teams and large enterprises.
Most Coachella attendees this year opted to use the festival’s installment payment plan, akin to BNPL
Bypassing traditional buy now, pay later (BNPL) providers, Coachella’s payment plans have become especially popular with the festival’s mostly younger crowd—and a significant revenue source for its promoters. According to reporting from Billboard, approximately 60% of general admission ticket buyers at this year’s festival opted to use Coachella’s payment plan. Buyers are charged a $41 upfront fee to enroll. With nearly 100,000 attendees expected, that fee alone generates more than $4 million, split between the ticketing company and the promoter. In a sense, that $41 may seem minor compared to the overall cost—general admission tickets for the three-day festival started at $499, plus fees. The payment plan allows attendees to get started with as little as $19.99, with the balance spread out over several months. For Coachella, that generally means the three-month stretch between the January lineup announcement and the festival itself. The use of these payment plans is soaring despite increased competition from traditional BNPL firms like Klarna and Affirm. With those providers, payments are generally made after the consumer has received their goods or services, and there are no fees. Coachella attendees must complete their payments prior to the festival. If they miss a scheduled payment, they have 10 days to bring their account current, or their ticket order is cancelled. However, the attendee does receive a credit toward next year’s festival. Coachella first began offering installment plans in 2009, with just 18% of attendees opting in at the time. Since then, that number has grown significantly. However, with the rise of BNPL plans, promoters may soon face increased competition. “BNPL plans offering 0% interest and no fee loans will usurp any prepay plans requiring an upfront fee,” said Ben Danner, Senior Analyst of Credit and Commercial at Javelin Strategy & Research. “Especially with a festival like Coachella, which attracts a younger demographic who are already using BNPL.”
Galileo’s product for fintechs identifies customer accounts designated for deposit sweeping, automates funds transfers above a defined threshold into designated high-yield accounts
Galileo Financial Technologies has introduced a product that automates deposit sweeps for FinTechs, enabling them to offer more competitive returns and peace of mind to customers whose balances exceed the FDIC insurance limit. The new Galileo Deposit Sweep facilitates the data exchange and reporting framework for FinTechs that collaborate with a deposit sweep provider and participating banks. The product identifies customer accounts designated for deposit sweeping, automates funds transfers above a defined threshold, and ensures the transfer of excess funds into designated high-yield accounts. “This solution enables FinTechs to offer better interest rates without increasing operational complexity,” Galileo Chief Product Officer David Feuer said. Galileo Deposit Sweep integrates with existing systems; ensures compliance with FDIC regulations by maintaining accurate records of deposits, ownership and beneficiaries; and provides participants with clear disclosures of the product’s operations and FDIC coverage. The company piloted this product with Bluevine, a business banking platform for small businesses
Ai2’s open platform allows tracing outputs of language models back to their token training data in real time, allowing inspection of the relationship between output and its data
Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) announced OLMoTrace, a one-of-a-kind feature that enables you to trace the outputs of language models back to their multi-trillion-token training data in real time. This level of traceability helps you understand hallucinations and fact check model responses, supports more effective model debugging, and provides the data traces required for AI governance, auditing, and regulation. OLMoTrace is a unique, first-of-its-kind addition to the Ai2 Playground—a platform interface that enables users to interact with Ai2’s advanced, fully open language models. Ai2’s models are uniquely capable of enabling a feature like OLMoTrace because all data behind them is fully open. The OLMoTrace feature introduces an unprecedented level of transparency, allowing users to inspect the relationship between a model’s output and its training data. By analyzing long, unique text spans within the model’s responses, this tool provides researchers, developers, and the public with a new opportunity to understand how AI systems “learn” and utilize specific information. Users can now verify the sources behind key model outputs, gaining new insight into both factual and creative content generated by the AI. The tool’s design ensures that the most unique and relevant spans are prioritized, with matches ranked by a retrieval relevance score.
Google’s AI-generated answers contain inaccurate information and unsafe advice and has caused traffic to small-to-mid-sized websites to plummet, say experts
Similarweb’s new AI Chatbot Traffic screen allows marketers and SEO professionals to identify and analyze web traffic originating from popular AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude – eliminating what would otherwise be a growing blind spot in digital analytics. With AI Chatbot Traffic, users see the overall estimated traffic volume and which platforms are linking to their content the most. In addition, they can see which pages are receiving the most AI chatbot referrals – displayed along with a list of top prompts that would direct users to each page’s content. These capabilities are now available within the familiar Similarweb platform that digital professionals use for SEO and competitive intelligence. Much like knowing the keywords that drive the most traffic is important to traditional search engine optimization, knowing the pages that attract the most AI chatbot traffic allows marketers to adjust their content strategy for the next generation of digital marketing optimization. Or Offer, CEO of Similarweb said “Our AI Chatbot Referral Traffic monitoring empowers businesses to navigate this new terrain by providing unparalleled insights into how AI interactions drive web traffic, enabling our clients to stay ahead in the competitive digital marketplace.”