As the financial world approaches 2025, shifts in banking and payments are unfolding. In B2B, however, these advances and innovations are running into a speed bump: the prevalence of paper checks. “There’s a relatively unacceptably high level of check usage here in the United States,” Seamus Smith, executive vice president and group president at FIS, said during a discussion for “PYMNTS Outlook 2025: Navigating the Future of Banking and Payments,” emphasizing the risks of fraud and inefficiency inherent to checks

Low-level bank employees are selling customer information to scammers, exposing a weakness in financial institutions’ risk protections.It’s a pattern cropping up at banks around the country, Bloomberg reported Monday (Dec. 30). Banks say the burden for preventing these types of scams falls to the customers themselves. But although some scams seem to target people randomly, others involve fraudsters who know a lot about their victims’ finances from the start.“The more employees there are inside a company with access to sensitive customer information, the higher the risk that access is going to be abused,” said R.J. Cross, a privacy advocate at the Public Interest Research Group, per the report. “Companies need to have technical measures in place to ensure employees and contractors can’t run off with people’s information or access data that isn’t necessary for their job duties.”Warnings about the issue aren’t new, the report said