Digital lending company LendAPI has teamed with Integration-Platform-as-a-Service (IPaaS) provider PortX.“Our advanced platform, when combined with PortX’s integration prowess, will enable financial institutions to not only simplify their lending and account opening processes but also to adopt more sophisticated, data-driven decision-making strategies,” Timothy Li, CEO of LendAPI, said in a news release Thursday (Feb. 29).“This partnership is about setting new standards in the industry and delivering unparalleled value to our clients,” Li added.According to the release, the LendAPI platform offers real-time custom credit scoring and variable setting capabilities for tenants, which lets financial institutions (FIs) tailor their lending criteria more precisely to their risk appetite and market needs.The companies said their integration is designed to be seamless, with LendAPI’s “comprehensive API endpoints” ensuring smooth integration with lenders’ infrastructures.“This collaboration ensures that FIs can effortlessly adopt and implement LendAPI’s advanced features, such as rule setting and shadow scoring, providing them with complete control over their decision-making processes,” the release said.Earlier this month, PortX launched a partnership with compliance platform Hummingbird, to make it easier for FIs to use Hummingbird’s services to investigate money laundering and other financial crimes.“With this partnership, any flags in the system for suspicious activities can be automatically pushed to Hummingbird,” said David Wexler, CEO of PortX.“This not only streamlines the process but also drastically reduces response times. It enhances the ability of FIs to promptly address and get ahead of potential issues, improving their overall risk management and compliance posture significantly,” Wexler said.Meanwhile, PYMNTS has recently been examining the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in helping FIs make lending decisions, even though some consumers feel uneasy about the technology’s place in the financial services world.PYMNTS Intelligence research has found that bank and FI customers “are apprehensive of GenAI in financial services, with over 70% expressing nervousness about its use in the banking sector, PYMNTS wrote earlier this month. “Only 58% stated they would be comfortable with their banks using this technology.”To address these concerns, most customers said that factors such as data transparency, human oversight and government regulation would make them more comfortable with the use of AI in financial services

The rapid advance of generative AI content creation tools such as voice cloning, video and image generation, and chatbots has already resulted in new forms of fraud and financial crime: recall the unfortunate worker in Hong Kong who was recently tricked into transferring $25 million to fraudsters impersonating his CFO.But even as the threats multiply thanks to gen AI — and the losses pile-up, with an estimated $485.6 billion lost to fraud globally in 2024, according to research from Nasdaq — there are technologists working on new ways to use AI and machine learning (ML) to help apprehend and deter those responsible.Take the San Francisco-headquartered startup Hummingbird, which launched in 2016 specifically to offer easy-to-use, secure tools in-house crime investigators and compliance teams at large financial institutions and payments providers (among its customers are payments platform Stripe, bespoke marketplace Etsy, the sports betting platform DraftKings, FirstBank Puerto Rico, and others).Today, in a VentureBeat exclusive, Hummingbird is announcing a new software Automations platform for customers, aimed at eliminating the manual, repetitive tasks that bog down investigators and compliance teams at large financial institutions.VB Event The AI Impact Tour – NYC We’ll be in New York on February 29 in partnership with Microsoft to discuss how to balance risks and rewards of AI applications. Request an invite to the exclusive event below. Request an invite“The goal is really bite-size automation recipes that help with financial crime investigations,” said Joe Robinson, CEO of Hummingbird, in a video call interview with VentureBeat. “And because this work is so regulated, any applications of AI or logic or algorithms in general need to be relatively transparent, very auditable, and process-focused with a human in the loop. Those are the key characteristics of what we’re doing.”The murky world of fi-crime investigationsInvestigating financial crime may seem to those outside the industry like something from an episode of Law and Order, filled with intrigue, drama, and suspense.And it certainly can be. But according to Robinson, the meat of the work is in combing through vast volumes of financial transaction data to find anomalies and determine if they are worth a closer look, as well as trace where the money is coming from and going to — is it being laundered, or derived from criminal activity?For banks and companies that accept payments, offer payment platforms, account solutions or wallets, the move in recent years has been to hire teams of dedicated, in-house investigators to do this job regularly, then call in outside authorities when proof of a crime has been assembled.“When you’re a financial crime investigator, you’re generally looking at the activity of of one of your customers and trying to suss out: ‘is the activity suspicious or not?'” Robinson explained.“For example, if I was at a payment card company, I might be looking at 15 to 30 different data sources that represent a specific customer’s activity

PortX, an integration technology company for financial institutions (FIs), has teamed with compliance platform Hummingbird. The collaboration is designed to make it easier for FIs to use Hummingbird’s compliance platform for anti-money laundering and financial crime investigations, the two companies said in a Tuesday (Feb. 6) press release. “With this partnership, any flags in the system for suspicious activities can be automatically pushed to Hummingbird,” said David Wexler, CEO of PortX. “This not only streamlines the process but also drastically reduces response times. It enhances the ability of FIs to promptly address and get ahead of potential issues, improving their overall risk management and compliance posture significantly.”