Opinions

The question is no longer whether the financial services industry needs a unified approach to combating instant payment fraud but who will take the lead to make it happen. The onus is on the biggest players in the market to show the way forward.

In the new open banking world, banks are no longer just service providers but platform enablers that offer everything from payment processing to account verification through application programming interfaces.

Open banking offers immense opportunities for the industry and the consumers it serves, but it will only deliver on this potential if banks proactively build customer trust and work together to assure standardization.

Long-term partnerships between banks and fintechs are the real future of financial services. Pharmaceutical firms' relationships with contract research organizations offer a useful model.

AI isn't inherently good or bad; its value depends entirely on how it's used. For financial institutions, this means shifting the focus from internal productivity gains to customer outcomes.

Non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies have no inherent value, so creating a federal "reserve" of them is absurd on its face. Chinese hacking of bitcoin will have no significant economic impact.

There are reasons to be cautious about how a strategic reserve of the cryptocurrency is established, but the economic arguments for including it in the federal government's portfolio are strong.

The era of unchecked AI enthusiasm is giving way to a more measured and deliberate approach. Organizations are beginning to see AI not as a panacea but as a powerful, albeit complex, tool that requires thoughtful implementation.

China currently dominates the market for the hardware and software used to mine cryptocurrency. Creating a large federal reserve would expose a major U.S. asset to potential Chinese meddling.

Industry players, regulators and law enforcement will need to work together in 2025 to ensure that as Americans increasingly rely on digital payments, the fraudsters trying to take advantage of them are kept at bay.