IBM Consulting and InfoSec Global are partnering to deliver advanced cryptographic discovery and inventory solutions across all industries and geographies. The rapid advancement of quantum computing poses a growing threat to cryptographic security, as quantum computers can break traditional cryptography, exposing vulnerabilities across digital operations. Organizations worldwide are requiring cryptographic assets to be inventoried, assessed, and modernized. IBM Consulting’s global delivery network and quantum safe security expertise will be combined with InfoSec Global’s AgileSec platform to accelerate customers’ transition to post-quantum cryptography and enable a risk-driven transformation to enterprise-wide cryptographic agility and compliance. The AgileSec platform enables the discovery, classification, and lifecycle management of cryptographic assets across hybrid and distributed environments. The partnership will enable IBM Consulting and InfoSec Global to jointly develop, market, and deliver cryptographic posture management solutions, helping clients tackle their most complex quantum-safe challenges. Client benefits of the IBM Consulting and InfoSec Global partnering could include: Addressing the risk of cryptographic blind spots and supporting adherence to compliance frameworks from NIST, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), and regulatory expectations; Accelerating modernization without costly re-platforming for crypto agility in-place; and Creating a future-ready and scalable quantum-safe architecture with measurable return on investment.
FTC data reveals the number of older adults (60 and above) who said they lost $10,000 or more to impersonation scams quadrupled between 2020 and 2024, while the number who lost more than $100,000 increased eightfold
A growing number of older adults are losing large sums of money to impersonation scams, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The number of people 60 and over who said they lost $10,000 or more to this form of fraud quadrupled between 2020 and 2024, while the number who lost more than $100,000 increased eightfold, the FTC said. In this form of fraud, scammers impersonate government agencies or businesses, contact consumers to alert them to a fake problem involving their accounts or their identity, and try to persuade them to transfer money to “keep it safe.” The scammers try to create a sense of urgency by telling consumers that their accounts are being used by someone else, that their Social Security number or other information is being used to commit crimes, or that their online accounts have been hacked. After persuading consumers to transfer their money, deposit cash into bitcoin ATMs, or hand cash or gold to couriers, the scammers steal those assets. “While younger people report losing money to these imposters too, reports of losses in the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars are much more likely to be filed by older adults, and those numbers have soared,” the FTC said in a Consumer Protection Data Spotlight.
Casap’s agentic AI platform for dispute and fraud resolution intelligently analyzes evidence, predicts outcomes, and automates issuing credits and filing chargebacks
Casap, the leader in intelligent automation for dispute and fraud operations, has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by Emergence Capital, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Primary Venture Partners, SoFi and others. The raise signals a surge in demand from financial institutions looking to streamline dispute resolution and reduce fraud losses while building consumer loyalty. Casap’s AI-powered platform is already in use by a fast-growing base of credit unions, banks and fintechs seeking to modernize their dispute process and lower fraud. Chartway FCU and MidSouth Community FCU are among the many institutions seeing real impact: over 51% reduction in fraud losses, positive ROI in weeks and scaled case volume without additional headcount. By replacing fragmented tools with a unified intelligent system, Casap helps teams resolve cases faster and build consumer trust. From intake to chargeback filing and member communication, Casap’s AI agents handle the full dispute lifecycle in one system. The platform intelligently analyzes evidence, predicts outcomes, and automates key actions, such as issuing credits, filing chargebacks and responding to merchants. Casap’s proprietary fraud score identifies suspicious consumers and merchants to proactively reduce disputes. Customers benefit from real-time decisions, predictive win scores, and self-service experiences that build trust.
Halo Invest’s platform for advisers offers a light-touch, client-administrated option to efficiently service customers with more modest assets allowing them to easily check progress for clients and corporate actions
Halo Invest Adviser Gateway is now live, offering advisers a light-touch, client-administrated option to efficiently service customers with more modest assets. The platform, led by CEO Douglas Boyce, has secured its first advice firm client and a strong pipeline of new business for the immediate future. The platform is built to make investing “simpler, fairer and better” through innovative functionality, including a transfer dashboard for advisers to easily check progress for clients and corporate actions that the adviser doesn’t need to respond to individually. It also uses Go Cardless for efficient client money addition. The platform features include onboarding, trading, custody, and reporting, as well as a comprehensive range of investments and wrappers. The senior management team at Halo Invest has close to 200 years of combined experience within financial services, including former Tatton CEO Helen O’Neill, Head of Risk and Compliance Wendy Crawford, and Head of Customer Lynn Johnston. Halo Invest Adviser Gateway represents an evolution rather than a revolution, helping advisers achieve profitability from parts of their client book where it was previously difficult or impossible.
Tracelight’s tech simplifies building financial modelling by integrating directly into the spreadsheet workflow, writing complex formulas, validating models and autonomously running analysis from simple natural language prompts
Tracelight, the UK-founded AI company making financial models easier to build and trust, has raised $3.6 million in seed funding. Tracelight bridges the gap between financial models and large language models (LLMs) by turning spreadsheet logic into LLM-friendly data, allowing financial analysts and consultants to harness the benefits of Generative AI when building complex financial models. By integrating directly into the spreadsheet workflow and enhancing how LLMs interpret and work with Excel, Tracelight eliminates repetitive modelling tasks. From writing complex formulas and validating models to autonomously running analysis from simple natural language prompts, it is a force multiplier for analysts, augmenting their skills with AI, letting them model faster and smarter without needing to change the way they work. Since launch, Tracelight has gained early traction among analysts at investment banks, private credit investment and private equity houses and leading professional services firms. Early users are already reporting >90% time savings on laborious modelling tasks like building common analyses, formatting, and finding errors. Crucially, Tracelight keeps humans in control of decision-making. Rather than replacing analysts, it enables them to build better financial models and focus on high-stakes decisions where human judgment is essential.
New crypto regulations signal a structural shift toward a unified model pushing banks to launch integrated platforms that merge tokenized assets and native crypto trade, offering access to multiple services via blockchain-based wallets akin to ‘super app’
Last week was a watershed in the evolution of the U.S. digital asset ecosystem, with two high-level official statements on next steps for the regulation and development of its market structure. Lifting the lid and peering more closely, however, reveals that it was more than that. Going beyond just digital assets, last week marked an inflection point in the traditional banking business model. Last Wednesday, the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets, or PWG, finally published the road map President Trump requested upon its creation back in January. The report adds 166 pages of detail to the administration’s promise to recover U.S. leadership in financial innovation by creating clear and supportive rules for the adoption of blockchain technology. The more than 100 proposals include a clarification as to what extent banks can participate in crypto asset activity; modernizing the payments infrastructure to support stablecoins; setting new capital rules for crypto assets held on bank balance sheets; increasing transparency around master account and bank charter applications; updating anti-money-laundering rules for decentralized services; and a whole lot more. Then, just one day later, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins delivered one of the more astonishing speeches in crypto history: He outlined Project Crypto, specifying four policy areas for his staff to focus on in their efforts to create a crypto framework. These include asset issuance, custody, licensing and the use of decentralized applications in financial markets. Both proposals came laden with detail as to intentions, a refreshing change. But even more surprising was the scope of the ambition. The initiatives are not just about creating new rules for crypto assets: They’re also about an overhaul of U.S. securities and banking regulation. As such, they impact all market participants, traditional and new. Essentially, the aim of the PWG report and the SEC’s Project Crypto is to blur the boundaries between traditional and blockchain-based markets and financial services. This may sound terrifying to many, as the structure of global finance is a complex web and any profound change will of course give birth to unforeseen risks.
Chrome autofill to show reward details for more credit cards — expanded now to over 100; also expanding popular pay-over-time options beyond Affirm and Zip
Google Pay is getting a handful of updates today centered around Chrome autofill, like expanded card benefit details. Last year, Chrome’s autofill dropdown menu started showing credit card reward details to help you decide which payment method to use for a transaction. For example, you might see “1.5% cash back” or “3x points on flights” alongside a photo of the card and full name. Desktop and mobile Chrome now supports over 100 credit cards in the US after initially working with American Express and Capital One. In addition to Affirm and Zip, Klarna, Afterpay, and other providers will appear as “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) options in Chrome autofill. “Pay over time options” will appear beneath credit/debit cards in the menu. You’re then presented with a list of the various options, and can continue from there with a virtual card generated for this purchase. To make “global money transfer easier,” wallet.google.com and Google Search (when you look up currency exchange rates) will “show straightforward fee and exchange rate information with remittance providers like Ria Money Transfer, Xe and Wise.” “Compare quotes & send money” appears below the chart with the ability to specify the amount. In the Wallet website, there’s a new “International transfers” page. Google will also let you send funds with those services “from the U.S. to India, Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines.” …with Stripe processing the funding transaction. This is still in testing and coming soon.
CrowdStrike’s integration with ChatGPT Enterprise API to offer unified visibility and protection across all human and non-human agent identities in over 175 SaaS applications by mapping each agent to its human creator
CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. has announced a native integration between its Falcon® Shield SaaS security and the OpenAI ChatGPT Enterprise Compliance API, providing visibility and governance for AI agents. The integration will support over 175 SaaS applications and helps organizations enhance the governance of AI agent identities and the human identities behind them. The security agent tool can map each agent to its human creator to identify risky behavior and enforce policy when needed. The integration, combined with Falcon® Identity Protection, offers unified visibility and protection across all human and non-human identities, enabling organizations to better oversee AI agents. CrowdStrike is a leader in AI-driven endpoint and cloud workload protection. While CRWD has potential as an investment, certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk.
Productivity app Ocean works with Gmail allowing users to turn their emails into tasks and action items and helps triage inbox by letting users filter emails by categories like first-timers, persistent pingers, and emails from contacts
A new personal productivity app called Ocean is launching to help you triage your overloaded inbox, take action on your emails by turning them into tasks, and share your availability for meetings with others, all in one app. The app works with Gmail or Google Workspace accounts, allowing users to turn their emails into tasks and action items so they’re not forgotten. To make this work, the app includes its own Task Manager that has access to the user’s email. That means you don’t have to copy or paste information into an external to-do app while instead gaining access to features that go beyond what Google’s task manager offers Gmail users. With Ocean, you can create tasks using rich formatting, set due dates, organize tasks into folders, and link emails to your task’s notes. It can also automatically pull out action items from longer emails for you. You can choose to manage the emails you mean to reply to later by creating a task as well, instead of leaving them unread or applying a label of some sort. For inbox zero enthusiasts, the killer feature will be Ocean’s inbox triage tools. The app lets you filter emails by categories like first-timers, persistent pingers, and emails from your contacts. It can even surface emails that are marked as spam but might belong in your inbox, so you don’t miss anything important. Ocean also offers subscription management tools in addition to the baseline email functions of composing, replying, flagging, archiving, and deleting email. Plus, Ocean offers built-in meeting scheduling tools that let you set your availability based on your pending and booked events. Here, you can set your open times and block others from booking those meetings at the last minute, which is a handy trick. You can also send an automated email invite to meeting recipients, confirm meeting proposals from a web interface, and automatically add confirmed meetings to your calendar.
McDonald’s using a digital experience that lets customers virtually interact with animated avatars of its promotional characters, play interactive mini-games, explore themed virtual worlds and unlock in-game wearables by completing quests
McDonald’s is introducing a new version of its McDonaldland promotional concept that is quite different from the 1970s version featuring costumed TV performers. Starting Tuesday, Aug. 12, the chain will roll out “McDonaldland VR,” an interactive digital experience launching alongside its new limited-time “McDonaldland Meal,” which will be on McDonald’s menu for a limited time this summer. (The meal features a milkshake with what the company describes as a “surprise flavor,” choice of a Quarter Pounder with Cheese or 10-piece Chicken McNuggets, fries and one of six exclusive collectible tins featuring postcards, stickers, and more. ). Inside McDonaldland VR, customers can virtually interact with fully animated avatars of McDonald’s promotional characters such as Grimace, Hamburglar and Birdie. Users can also play interactive mini-games, explore themed virtual worlds such as the Hamburger Patch, search for hidden digital collectibles such as Mt. McDonaldland Shake icons and various Easter eggs throughout the virtual world, and complete quests to unlock in-game wearables like the Mayor McCheese Hat, Burger Buddy Backpack and Ronald McDonald’s Guitar. McDonaldland VR will be available on Meta Horizon Worlds via the Meta Quest VR headset and via browser-based Web VR access.