Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI and creator of ChatGPT and more – along with the PayPal Mafia https://www.ceotodaymagazine.com/2025/04/who-owns-chatgpt/ – was speaking about bank capital rules this week and made an interesting comment that: “There are some FIs that will accept a voice print to move a lot of money. That is a crazy thing to still be doing. AI has fully defeated that.”
What?
Well, he’s right.
We have a lot of banking services that depend on usernames and passwords, most of which have hacked and shared on the dark web; 2FA, two factor authorisation using some other OTP, one time password – well that can be overcome these days; FaceID, voice prints and fingerprints, which AI can now fake authentically; and more. In particular, his point is that the customer onboarding process can easily be faked these days, as voices and faces can be created easily of anyone you want to look like and be. Therefore, if you are running KYC, Know Your Customer, using facial recognition and voice prints, you need to rethink it. The question is change it to what and how?
The answer is always-on KYC compliance checks, or perpetual KYC if you like.
Every single contact with the bank needs to recognise that the person is human and not a bot; it needs verify that the verification is being operated by a human, and not a bot; the bank needs to analyse every touch and call, and ensure it is real, and not deep fake.
That’s quite a challenge, but always-on authentication, verification and identification using always-on analytics to deliver perpetual KYC is the new order of the day.
The way to deliver this is constant risk analytics using the banks own bots. Bot-to-bot methods of authenticating using AI engines will have the fraud bots being identified by the bank bots before things go through. The deep fake face or voice will be picked up by the tracking and behavioural analytics of the bank bots. The day of the bank bots is here.
But this is nothing new. Ten years ago, I remember visiting Ant Group in China and they had already developed such analytics. Every single transaction was being analysed in real time by AI analytics to identify anything suspect, and they had a massive football sized screen showing the green, amber and red movements of money around China in a private reception area. It was fascinating.
Rather than keeping this to themselves, they recently shared their system with the rest of the world.
Ant International Launches AI Platform for Fintech Sector
According to their announcement, AI fraud using deepfake technology has increased more than 10-fold annually, and that 22% of businesses have encountered AI-generated payment fraud.
The AI SHIELD framework aims to stop this by using real-time dynamic risk assessment, including detection of adversarial prompts and sensitive data leakage, through more than 100 recognition models and 600,000 risk lexicons. Overall, the platform integrates more than 20 large language models.
They are doing a lot more than this and, bearing in mind their fraud levels internally are around a twentieth of those in general financial markets, they seem to be doing well. It just makes you wonder how, even when facing a formidable player like Ant, criminals can still squeeze some fraudulent transactions through the network … but that’s the nature of money.
Banks and fintechs is where the money is, and so criminals and fraudsters will always innovate to hack and fake their systems. The trick is to be just half a step behind to keep up, and not fall behind.
That reminds me of the Global Head of Fraud at one of the world’s largest banks telling me that “there is an acceptable level of fraud”. He estimated the maximum acceptable level is two percent of transactions. Without perpetual KYC using AI analytics to create a transactional shield, it could easily be more these days.
Meanwhile, if you want to see the whole of Sam Altman's chat about bank exposures and rules, watch the 45 minute youtube below:
Chris M Skinner
Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, TheFinanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal's Financial News. To learn more click here...