Financial Services Communicators On Trust, Content Authentication and Digital Safety
“Scammers are Impersonating Banks” was the headline of a recent email from one of the world’s largest banks. It continued… they can make caller ID, emails, and texts display as messages from your bank.
Websites are being cloned, deepfake videos created, and fraudulent and manipulated corporate announcements generated and shared. It’s not just financial services firms that are facing significant new challenges in the AI world, but they are a target. As bank robber Willie Sutton said, “because that’s where the money is.”
At the same time banks, securities firms, asset managers, and insurance companies are looking at ways to deploy artificial intelligence to drive efficiencies and create new opportunities, AI is being deployed against them. This is true for all industries.
To quote a cybersecurity expert: “Attackers are increasingly using agentic AI systems, polymorphic malware and AI-generated social engineering to automate reconnaissance, adapt intrusions in real time, and persist after remediation. These techniques compress the available time to respond and undermine more traditional defense approaches.”
For the non-technical, here’s a summary: criminals are using AI to create content designed to manipulate markets and defraud companies and clients faster than ever, and the old defenses aren’t keeping up.
The solutions to these new challenges were the focus yesterday of a breakfast roundtable discussion with financial services CCOs, CMOs, content and agency leaders, and an advance copy of a new Tauth Labs white paper shared at the event, “Trust, Content Authentication, and Financial Services.”
Organized by Tauth Labs, Korn Ferry, Leibowitz Branding and Design, and Water & Wall, and with panelists from the Content Authenticity Initiative/Adobe, LinkedIn and Virtual Human Economy, content authentication was discussed as a potential solution to declining trust in content and rising fraud.
The paper notes that for every cyberattack on a company or individual; for every phishing event; and every time consumers receive, read, or watch content that is fake or designed to deceive, a little bit of trust is lost. “If audiences question, or no longer trust, that content is authentic, they will ignore it and not act on it. Since driving behavior is the purpose of the communications and marketing industries, and critical to the functioning of the digital economy, this is an existential threat.”
The origin story of the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) and Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA); how authentication builds a layer of digital safety and provenance into content; and financial services use cases for the technology were addressed.
Risks and solutions were framed around the ideas of protect - using content authentication to build trust into content; detect - identifying issues in a world in which shadow content is the norm not the exception; and, correct - communications and technology-driven playbooks to address crises and reputational issues.
The panelists underscored a key takeaway that content authentication is a fundamentally important new technology and tool to build trust into content in all its forms. Although much of the discussion addressed the value of helping audiences differentiate authentic from potentially fake content, panelists also noted its value to increase trust in new forms of content, including digital twins in the digital economy. “Not all AI is bad,” was a key part of the panel discussion.
The new paper details ten specific applications of content authentication in financial services ranging from high-value corporate announcements and videos, to research reports and invoices.
A takeaway from the paper is that content authentication is not a silver bullet, it should be used as part of multi-layered solutions to what is increasingly a multi-dimensional set of challenges facing communicators in the AI Age.
