Pam is walking around Shanghai and sees shops that contain shoes, handbags, clothes, and jewelry that are all emblazoned with the logos of famous designers.  Upon walking inside, she notices that many of these products, while not very cheap, are still markedly cheaper than if she were to buy the exact same product in the United States.  The quality looks and feels great, so without a second thought, she purchases a handbag.  After all, this isn’t a shady stand on a roadside.  This is a seemingly legitimate store.  It isn’t until she’s back in the United States that she discovers that the Louis Vuitton handbag that she bought is a fake. This type of situation is fairly common.  There are often only subtle differences between a real and fake product that may not be detectable at first touch or first look.  Other times, people are aware that what they’re purchasing is a counterfeit good and simply don’t care.  Regard ...

In the past two weeks, America has seen catastrophic devastation from both Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma.  As a result, thousands of Americans are struggling with all the damage incurred to their property. As homes and cars are still submerged in floodwaters, insurance companies have to find ways to quickly and effectively resolve insurance claims to provide fast relief.  To do this, some companies have been deploying predictive analytics and machine learning tools to respond to insurance claims – and there have been plenty.  Esurance is one such company. 

Just like much of the content on the internet, fake news is funded largely by advertising.  Therefore, this week Facebook announced that pages that share “fake news,” or false stories masquerading as truth, will no longer be allowed to advertise on its platform.  The goal is straightforward:  to punish pages that link to stories that are marked as “false” by third-party fact-checkers from making money. 

In the wake of the tragic violence in Charlottesville earlier this month, it’s even more evident that online extremism continues to pose serious threats to society. While battling extremism is an important step in preventing the spread of hate and violence around the world, there are many inherent challenges, including the sheer volume of daily posts, complexity of purpose for videos, and the need to adhere to free speech rights.  In spite of these challenges, industry has been committed to this effort for many years—we’ve highlighted some of this in the past, including industry efforts to cooperate with law enforcement, and formation of a partnership to fight terrorism.

The Atlantic Council and Thomson Reuters released a timely report on “Big Data: A Twenty-First Century Arms Race” on June 27, 2017, at a well-attended event at the Atlantic Council’s Washington, D.C. headquarters.  Policymakers all over the world should be aware of the powerful tools at their disposal such as World-Check to address political and economic threats.  This is something of a theme for SIIA.  Recently, for example, we wrote about how artificial intelligence (AI) can help in the anti-money laundering (AML) fight.   We have also written about how FICO’s AML tool works.  The Atlantic Council report contains many realistic policy recommendations, which policymakers from different regulatory “silos” should review.  This is another theme for SIIA.  Regulators and policymakers should engage in regular dialogue with each other.  For example, financial supervisors and privacy regulators should talk to ea ...

Online advertising is an increasingly important source of revenue for online content creators, who include professional journalists to web developers to bloggers and provide tremendous value to the Internet ecosystem. To remain afloat, these content creators rely on effective online advertising in order to continue to provide their service or business.

You probably have gotten a call or email from your credit card issuer asking if you made a particular transaction. Ever wonder what triggered it?  Turns out it is a form of artificial intelligence called a neural network.  Instead of creating general rules about what transactions are likely to be fraudulent, a neural network just looks at all your transactions and figures out your very own individual pattern of usage. If a new transaction is significantly out of pattern, that’s when you get the call or the email.

More than 50 million Americans don’t receive credit scores because of insufficient or nonexistent credit information. Consider what this means – nearly 15 percent of the adult population can’t get a mortgage, rent a car or use a credit card. But this barrier, which limits personal economic power and holds back our economy, is increasingly being broken-down by the use of new, alternative data sources and modeling techniques.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend a screening of 21st Century Fox’s “Hidden Figures.”  This is a great movie about the critical contributions made by three African-American women – Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson -  to put John Glenn into space in the early 1960s.  The movie depicts the struggles these women faced to be treated equally as the consummate professionals they were at a time when the state of Virginia still enforced segregation laws.  It is a wonderful and uplifting story about a mostly unexplored but important dimension of American history.  Go see it! There is an interesting sub-plot to the movie, which has to do with the usually somewhat dry – at least on the big screen -  topic of automation and jobs.  Johnson, Vaughn and Jackson were hired by NASA to be human “computers.”  Part of Johnson’s job was to calculate John Glenn’s exact landing zone in ...

The labor economist David Autor opens a recent TED talk with a startling fact: in the 45 years since the introduction of the Automatic Teller Machine, bank teller jobs have roughly doubled, from a quarter of a million to half a million. Since 2000, financial institutions have created 100,000 new bank teller jobs.