Financial Services Cloud Council and Forum

The FTC recently finalized its plans for rules barring online platforms from posting fake reviews and product testimonials, and of course this includes those generated by AI. Going after businesses that generate and sell AI generated "testimonials" for e-commerce brands and prohibiting platforms and brands from buying fake reviews or generating them has good intentions but will have a multitude of challenges in execution and could create a multitude of unintended consequences for financial services institutions.

Aside from financial institutions need to significantly enhance their data collection, verification, validation and lineage to authenticate the identity of reviewers without compromising privacy, adding secure storage for increased volumes of customer transaction data to verify and authenticate legitimate purchases and balancing that against the compliance requirements of CCPA and GDPR, the pressures on an FI's overall security posture increases many fold.

Financial Institutions are now facing more attack surfaces, greater vulnerability and increased risks from both generative AI attacks as well as social engineering attacks during the review and verification process.  Having to integrate AI detection and countermeasures into existing systems that are now going to become exposed while not increasing customer friction is going to be a massive challenge for consumer facing FIs. Added to this are a number of chargeback complexities and potential increases in fraud which increase friction with small businesses, not to mention put a massive damper on cross-border transaactions.