Experian announced the integration of Mastercard’s identity verification and fraud prevention technology into the Experian Ascend Platform. This collaboration will enable seamless, secure, and efficient identity verification for global clients, helping to prevent fraud and cybercrime. A key feature in Experian’s Identity and Fraud solutions, identity verification, plays a vital role in the fight to prevent fraud and cybercrime. Mastercard’s Identity Insights enriches Experian’s data by verifying and connecting identity elements, aiming to validate individuals’ authenticity. When combined with Experian’s advanced fraud-detection capabilities, the integration offers robust protection against synthetic identity and application fraud, enhancing detection while reducing friction for legitimate customers. The joint solution delivers powerful identity assessment by uniting the Experian Ascend Platform—a decision engine built on Experian’s comprehensive data, strategy design, decision automation, monitoring and reporting—with Mastercard’s Identity Insights for validating identity elements such as name, email, and phone numbers, and analyzing related metadata. Greg Wright, Executive Vice President of Identity and Fraud, Experian Software Solutions said, “By enabling clients with advanced analytics solutions that bring credit, identity, and fraud data into the Ascend Platform, we help them achieve their strategic goals while also driving greater financial inclusion for consumers.”
Promoting financial literacy requires banks to provide access to relevant information through live learning sessions with credit experts and self-paced modules and investing the time to engage community leaders and nonprofits in creating right resources
For nearly two decades, I’ve had the opportunity to meet and mentor a lot of high school and college students. While we talk about their experiences growing up and personal and professional ambitions, many of our conversations center on financial literacy. And the reason is young people need to understand how finances and credit can impact their lives. Financial literacy isn’t just a skill; it’s a life tool that needs to be nurtured from a young age. Unfortunately, money isn’t always a popular dinner table topic for a lot of families. We need to change that. During my childhood, I was lucky enough to learn basic financial management principles from my grandfather. He taught me the importance of a dollar. His lessons laid the foundation for my understanding of money and the importance of building and protecting your financial health. However, I recognize not everyone has a mentor. In fact, many young people, particularly from underserved communities, experience the opposite; where parents and family members take out loans and credit cards in the child’s name and don’t always pay back the debt, setting their children back before their financial journey even begins. Oftentimes our earliest experiences with financial literacy start with seeing our parents’ struggles, but without the proper guidance and context, these lessons can come at a high cost. Entering their college years, young people are applying for and managing student loans, receiving preapproved credit card offers and taking out auto loans, among other forms of credit. Sometimes our younger selves can misinterpret access to credit and other financial resources with financial independence, and if we don’t pay back these loans, the consequences can be dire.
That’s where the financial services community can play a more transformative role. It’s not enough for banks and other financial institutions to offer products that cater to a younger demographic, there has to be a long-term commitment to engage them and make financial literacy more accessible and relevant. Everything boils down to access to information. For instance, Experian, the global data and technology company, and HomeFree-USA lead an initiative offering students from historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, an opportunity to participate in live learning sessions with credit experts, as well as self-paced modules. The effort culminates in a competition where participants present innovative business ideas to further financial literacy in our communities. It’s a program that doesn’t just focus on helping a select group of students absorb financial knowledge and build their financial health, rather it centers on closing the resource gap across the spectrum. So, many of the students take the lessons they learn and share them with their peers and communities. It’s a one plus one equals three approach. Effective financial literacy programming requires a commitment to investing in change. But that doesn’t always mean a financial investment. Every community is different. Different in their struggles, different in their relationships with money and different in their perceptions of the mainstream financial system. Investing the time to engage community leaders, including faith-based organizations and nonprofits, empowers the financial services community to better understand their customers’ situations and create resources that are relevant to them. A willingness to listen and learn from the people they’re trying to reach helps foster trust and demonstrates a genuine commitment to financial empowerment. The journey to financial empowerment goes through financial literacy, and it requires an earnest effort to engage people, particularly at a young age. Financial literacy cannot be a check-the-box exercise. By starting financial education at a young age and maintaining a focus on long-term support, we can help the next generation navigate the complexities of the financial world with confidence and resilience. It is time for banks and businesses to step up and be part of this vital mission.
Bonfy.AI’s platform uses AI-powered business context and entity-aware analysis to detect and prevent content risks at rest, in motion, and in use across SaaS, Shadow AI, and custom applications
Bonfy.AI, a pioneer in adaptive content security, has launched its Bonfy Adaptive Content Security™ (Bonfy ACS™) unified platform. The platform, backed by $9.5 million in seed funding in 2024, uses AI-powered business context and logic to prevent exposures such as oversharing, IP leakage, privacy violations, and non-compliant communications. Bonfy’s proprietary AI-powered technology is used to analyze and manage content risks associated with AI tools, documents, emails, and communications like Slack. The platform addresses the complexities of modern data security by providing contextual intelligence, behavioral analytics, and adaptive remediation capabilities. Bonfy ACS is versatile for various applications, including SaaS, Shadow AI, and custom applications. It enforces communication and sharing policies and mitigates risks related to cybersecurity, privacy, compliance, IP protection, and reputation. Bonfy ACS is ideal for organizations implementing GenAI initiatives, especially in regulated and security-conscious verticals like healthcare, insurance, finance, legal, media, and technology. Key Capabilities of Bonfy ACS: Detects and prevents content risks at rest, in motion, and in use. Supports various SaaS applications and communication platforms such as HubSpot, Google Mail, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Slack, and SMTP. Uses auto-learning for business context creation and entity-aware analysis. Provides out-of-the-box policies for best practices and regulations. Integrates with incident response platforms and notification systems. Offers executive visibility through customizable dashboards. Delivery: SaaS; Flexible hosting options.
Zama’s Fully Homomorphic Encryption solution enables processing data without decryption during both transit and processing allowing developers to build on-chain financial applications on public blockchains with end-to-end encryption
Zama has raised $57 million in a Series B funding round to expand its end-to-end encryption solutions for public blockchains, which it said enables developers to build on-chain financial applications that are secure, scalable and compliant. The company will use the new funding to support its mainnet launch, ecosystem adoption and research efforts to make financial transactions built with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scale to thousands of transactions per second. FHE enables data processing without decryption, so encryption is maintained during both transit and processing. That means “all online activities can now be truly end-to-end encrypted.” Zama’s FHE solutions are likely to benefit public blockchains first but could benefit any industry that uses cloud computing and requires greater confidentiality and compliance. Zama is commercializing an entirely new generational technology that could redefine how confidentiality is handled in the blockchain and, ultimately, in all of cloud computing. Zama’s FHE protocol is efficient and developer-friendly and supports decentralized applications (dApps) for AI, crypto and cloud. The protocol paves the way for on-chain identity, financial and consumer applications — previously out of reach for developers.
SUPERWISE platform enables enterprises to deploy, manage and scale AI agents developed using a variety of proprietary and open-source tools while offering built-in compliance, monitoring, and operational oversight
Enterprise AI Governance and Operations platform SUPERWISE unveiled its open AgentOps platform enabling companies to safely deploy agents developed in a variety of proprietary and open-source development platforms. This release emboldens teams to deploy, serve, and manage AI agents within the SUPERWISE platform, complete with built-in compliance, monitoring, and operational oversight. It marks a significant step forward in making responsible AI not just possible, but secure, scalable, and successful. With this launch, SUPERWISE is enabling teams to use the best open-source tools to build agents, while relying on our enterprise-grade infrastructure to govern, observe, and scale them safely.” SUPERWISE’s AgentOps platform will benefit a variety of stakeholders: AI Developers & Engineers: Use their preferred tools without sacrificing operational oversight; Enterprise IT & AI Leaders: Centralize operations while enabling innovation and avoiding vendor lock-in; C-Level Executives: Balance agility with governance, security, and scalability, and a lower total cost of ownership. The platform enables developers to capitalize on a variety of common preferences, including open-source software, low-code interfaces, built-in integrations, strong community support, and ease-of-deployment. The platform today supports the deployment and operation of agents for its development framework Flowise, and a growing list of soon-to-be announced third-party frameworks, including Dify, CrewAI, Langflow, N8n and many others.
Acuvity context-aware GenAI security platform detects unsanctioned GenAI usage across browsers, applications, and developer tools and identifies prompt-based exploits, model abuse across the full AI lifecycle
Acuvity has launched RYNO, the first GenAI security platform purpose-built to deliver context-aware protection and adaptive risk management across users, applications, and AI-powered agents. RYNO gives security teams the clarity, control, and confidence they need to enable innovation without compromising trust or compliance. Acuvity’s RYNO delivers six advanced features designed to operationalize GenAI security across the full AI lifecycle: Shadow AI Discovery – Detects unsanctioned GenAI usage across browsers, applications, and developer tools. DLP++ – Redefines data loss prevention by using contextual inspection to detect and stop sensitive data leakage in real time. Threat Protection – Identifies prompt-based exploits, model abuse, and agent manipulation through intelligent risk analysis. AI Firewall – Provides runtime inspection and behavioral protection for model interactions and tool calls. AI Runtime Security – Protects GenAI agents and applications across development, testing, and production environments. MCP Security – Offers dedicated security for the Model Context Protocol, a growing backbone of agentic AI infrastructure. RYNO’s architecture is anchored in context-driven security outcomes, enabling enterprises to safely adopt GenAI without slowing down innovation. The platform’s four core capabilities are: Full Spectrum Visibility; Adaptive Risk ; Contextual Intelligence (Context IQ); Dynamic Policy Engine.
Car makers are holding off from Apple’s CarPlay Ultra in favor of their own solutions, due to limited avenue to sell subscriptions to drivers from infotainment system and in-car services, along with design and UI challenges
Apple’s CarPlay Ultra faces a long road to becoming a widely-used feature, as car makers are pushing back on supporting Apple’s system in favor of their own solutions. Car manufacturers Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Volvo, Polestar, and Renault have no interest to include CarPlay Ultra support in their vehicles. While Volvo is among those rejecting CarPlay Ultra, chief executive Hakan Samuelsson did admit that car makers don’t so software as well as tech companies. “There are others who can do that better, and then we should offer that in our cars,” he insisted. While design and interface discussions are the more obvious reasons for holding off from CarPlay Ultra, manufacturers also have another incentive. It is said that the infotainment system and in-car services are still a possible revenue source for car makers. This was one of the reasons why GM ditched CarPlay in favor of its own system in 2023, due to the potential to sell subscriptions to drivers. For some car manufacturers shying away from handing over control to CarPlay Ultra, they are stopping short of blocking Apple entirely. In most cases, the current limited CarPlay will still be offered, in tandem with their own systems. BMW insisted that CarPlay will be used in its infotainment system. Meanwhile, Audi believes it should provide drivers “a customized and seamless digital experience” of its own creation, while still maintaining CarPlay support.
Apple’s Swift coding language to add support to Android platform with focus on improving support for official distribution, determining the range of supported Android API levels and developing support for debugging Swift applications
Apple usually doesn’t give Android the time of day, but that’s not stopping the company’s Swift coding language from expanding over to Android app development. Android apps are generally coded in Kotlin, but Apple is looking to provide its Swift coding language as an alternative. Apple first launched its coding language back in 2014 with its own platforms in mind, but currently also supports Windows and Linux officially. Swift has opened up an “Android Working Group” which will “establish and maintain Android as an officially supported platform for Swift.” A few of the key pillars the Working Group will look to accomplish include: 1) Improve and maintain Android support for the official Swift distribution, eliminating the need for out-of-tree or downstream patches 2) Recommend enhancements to core Swift packages such as Foundation and Dispatch to work better with Android idioms 3) Work with the Platform Steering Group to officially define platform support levels generally, and then work towards achieving official support of a particular level for Android 4) Determine the range of supported Android API levels and architectures for Swift integration 5) Develop continuous integration for the Swift project that includes Android testing in pull request checks. 6) Identify and recommend best practices for bridging between Swift and Android’s Java SDK and packaging Swift libraries with Android apps 7) Develop support for debugging Swift applications on Android 8) Advise and assist with adding support for Android to various community Swift packages.
Car makers are holding off from Apple’s CarPlay Ultra in favor of their own solutions, due to limited avenue to sell subscriptions to drivers from infotainment system and in-car services, along with design and UI challenges
Apple’s CarPlay Ultra faces a long road to becoming a widely-used feature, as car makers are pushing back on supporting Apple’s system in favor of their own solutions. Car manufacturers Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Volvo, Polestar, and Renault have no interest to include CarPlay Ultra support in their vehicles. While Volvo is among those rejecting CarPlay Ultra, chief executive Hakan Samuelsson did admit that car makers don’t so software as well as tech companies. “There are others who can do that better, and then we should offer that in our cars,” he insisted. While design and interface discussions are the more obvious reasons for holding off from CarPlay Ultra, manufacturers also have another incentive. It is said that the infotainment system and in-car services are still a possible revenue source for car makers. This was one of the reasons why GM ditched CarPlay in favor of its own system in 2023, due to the potential to sell subscriptions to drivers. For some car manufacturers shying away from handing over control to CarPlay Ultra, they are stopping short of blocking Apple entirely. In most cases, the current limited CarPlay will still be offered, in tandem with their own systems. BMW insisted that CarPlay will be used in its infotainment system. Meanwhile, Audi believes it should provide drivers “a customized and seamless digital experience” of its own creation, while still maintaining CarPlay support.
Apple’s Swift coding language to add support to Android platform with focus on improving support for official distribution, determining the range of supported Android API levels and developing support for debugging Swift applications
Apple usually doesn’t give Android the time of day, but that’s not stopping the company’s Swift coding language from expanding over to Android app development. Android apps are generally coded in Kotlin, but Apple is looking to provide its Swift coding language as an alternative. Apple first launched its coding language back in 2014 with its own platforms in mind, but currently also supports Windows and Linux officially. Swift has opened up an “Android Working Group” which will “establish and maintain Android as an officially supported platform for Swift.” A few of the key pillars the Working Group will look to accomplish include: 1) Improve and maintain Android support for the official Swift distribution, eliminating the need for out-of-tree or downstream patches 2) Recommend enhancements to core Swift packages such as Foundation and Dispatch to work better with Android idioms 3) Work with the Platform Steering Group to officially define platform support levels generally, and then work towards achieving official support of a particular level for Android 4) Determine the range of supported Android API levels and architectures for Swift integration 5) Develop continuous integration for the Swift project that includes Android testing in pull request checks. 6) Identify and recommend best practices for bridging between Swift and Android’s Java SDK and packaging Swift libraries with Android apps 7) Develop support for debugging Swift applications on Android 8) Advise and assist with adding support for Android to various community Swift packages