By Tara Payne and Drew Ruben, Bank Policy Institute
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Americans’ savings are at risk as never before as new, technology-driven fraud and scams are surging across the U.S, costing American households an estimated $12.5 billion in 2024, a 25 percent increase over the previous year. These are just reported losses, with actual totals likely much higher. Using sophisticated technology, scammers are directly targeting unsuspecting consumers, and there’s no better route to a consumer than through their phone and its apps.
Scammers rely on social media channels and communication networks to reach customers. According to a recent Aspen Institute report, 68% of Americans reported receiving scam calls at least weekly, 61% of Americans reported receiving scam text messages at least weekly and about one-third of Americans say they get scam phone calls at least daily. These statistics are alarming and demonstrate that current policies for addressing fraud are insufficient. And while financial institutions are doing their part to educate consumers and mitigate incidents of fraud, by the time fraud reaches the banks’ systems, consumers may have already been harmed and their funds put at risk. As a result, action from industries and regulatory bodies outside of the banking sector is needed to achieve a durable solution.
The Problem and the Solutions
Phone scams have become part of everyday life for American consumers, and they’re becoming more sophisticated and convincing, boosted by AI deepfakes, voice cloning and location spoofing. Many scams originate from organized transnational crime groups that leverage global communications infrastructure to target Americans at scale.
In this global piracy enterprise, the FCC’s task is to safeguard the ports of entry and regulate the highways upon which data travels. Helpful steps would include: mandating standards for authenticating all U.S. calls; alerting consumers to unauthenticated calls and messages, especially international ones; deploying robust international anti-scam filters to block spoofing and mass campaigns; enforcing anti-fraud standards consistently across mobile virtual network operators; and sharing confirmed scam numbers and traffic data across carriers.
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By PYMNTS Data Books
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New PYMNTS Intelligence research reveals that younger households are juggling multiple bills, deploying more coping strategies and facing growing family-related costs during their peak earning years. Yet even as millennials work harder to manage their finances, their confidence that strategies are working is slipping.
Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996 and now age 30–45, are navigating a cost-of-living environment that has ceased spiking and cooling to stay persistently high. In this Data Book, these consumers (including bridge millennials, born between 1978 and 1988 and now age 38–48) stand out for the number of overlapping financial pressures they face, the number of tactics they use to cope and how quickly their confidence in those maneuvers is eroding.
Five Millennial-Centered Data Points
Cost Pressures
Millennials report an average of 3.4 simultaneous cost pressures, while baby boomers and seniors report 2.6. Financial management for this younger generation increasingly involves juggling multiple bills rather than solving a single problem.
Grocery Squeeze
Grocery stress for millennials rose 11 percentage points from October to January, increasing from 79% to 90%. For these consumers, even routine spending now requires active day-to-day tradeoffs.
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By Howard Solomon, CSO Magazine
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HR staff need to understand that these unfamiliar files execute commands and shouldn’t be opened.
Threat actors are still having success tricking human resources staff into opening malware-infected phishing emails.
The latest example is detailed by researchers at Aryaka, who this week described a campaign by an unnamed threat actor who is distributing resumés containing a malicious ISO file to HR departments. It’s delivered through recruitment channels, and hosted on what an employee, or an email gateway’s filters, would see as trusted cloud infrastructure.
When the victim mounts the ISO, which is an archive of an optical disc such as a DVD, and opens its contents, a malicious shortcut (.lnk) is executed, launching obfuscated PowerShell commands that extract hidden payloads embedded within a steganographic image. A malicious DLL is then sideloaded using a legitimate signed application, allowing the attacker’s code to run under the guise of trusted software. The goal is to harvest data from the infected computer.
The malware’s most alarming feature, says Aryaka, is an internal module dubbed BlackSanta which shuts down endpoint detection and response (EDR) agents that would detect this attack. It deploys a Bring-Your-Own Vulnerable Driver (BYOVD) technique that loads legitimate but exploitable kernel drivers, gaining low-level system access, then systematically turns off security tools.
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By Dave Kovaleski, Financial Regulation News
The Federal Reserve Board is seeking public feedback on a proposal to codify the removal of reputation risk from its supervision of banks.
The proposal reiterates the Fed board’s policy against penalizing or prohibiting an institution from banking a customer engaged in legal activity.
“We have heard troubling cases of debanking—where supervisors use concerns about reputation risk to pressure financial institutions to debank customers because of their political views, religious beliefs, or involvement in disfavored but lawful businesses,” Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman said. “Discrimination by financial institutions on these bases is unlawful and does not have a role in the Federal Reserve’s supervisory framework.”
In June, the board announced that reputation risk would no longer be a component of examination programs in its supervision of banks.
This new proposal would build on that announcement to help ensure supervisory decisions are based on material financial risks. It also seeks to increase clarity and facilitate greater precision in supervisory decision-making. Further, it would support the Board’s focus on core financial risk in its supervision of banks.
However, this change does not alter the board’s expectation that banks maintain strong risk management to ensure safety and soundness and compliance with law and regulation.
Comments are due within 60 days after publication in the Federal Register.
By Sherry Virden, CreditUnions.com; This is part of the Callahan Financial Performance Series.
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The nationwide affordability crisis has become an inescapable issue for credit union members, affecting how they borrow, spend, and plan for the future.
From housing and vehicles to education and everyday essentials, the cost of daily living is on the rise, leaving many households struggling to save, qualify for loans, and manage debt.
In today’s economy, it is essential that credit unions balance member support with sustainable lending practices that ensure continued operations for those in need.
Housing Prices Reposition The Real Estate Portfolio
Housing prices are climbing faster than wages in many regions, and members are struggling to save for down payments, qualify for mortgages, or comfortably manage monthly payments if they do buy.
At the same time, other residential real estate products — namely HELOCs — have surged. Existing homeowners are increasingly tapping equity for not only home improvements but also to pay down student loans, consolidate high‑interest debt, and cover unexpected expenses.
New Pressures Drive New Lending Plays
Higher sticker prices, rising interest rates, and longer loan terms mean monthly car payments now consume a larger share of already-strained household budgets for longer.
Considering the affordability concerns with new cars, used auto — traditionally the more budget-friendly option — remains the dominant vehicle loan. However, even the average used car loan balance has increased 3.0% at credit unions since last year, suggesting new loans for used auto are larger than they used to be. That can be a major barrier for members in need of new transportation.
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By Frank Diekmann, CU Daily
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John Crews, deputy assistant secretary for financial institutions policy in the Treasury department, has emerged as the leading candidate to be nominated to the NCUA board and replace the departing Kyle Hauptman, sources have told the CU Daily.
Crews was appointed to the position in mid-2025 and has a long history in Washington. Prior to joining the Treasury Department, he served as a policy advisor to Majority Leader Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), where he covered economic and financial services policy, and prior to that was the policy director of the Senate Banking Committee.
During the first Trump Administration, he served on the National Economic Council as a special assistant to the President for Economic Policy. Crews, who has held numerous other positions as a staffer on the Hill going back a decade, is a graduate of Princeton University with a BA in politics.
In September, Crews and Hauptman were on the same agenda for a Hike the Hill event hosted by the League of Credit Unions, where Crews appeared as part of a “fireside chat.”
The NCUA board currently has one member, Chairman Kyle Hauptman, who is waiting to exit after the Securities and Exchange Commission announced he has been appointed to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB).
Hauptman, whose term expired in August of 2025, has said he would remain on the board until a successor could be nominated and approved by the Senate. Credit union advocates on Capitol Hill have said they do not believe Hauptman’s appointment would have been announced were a successor not in the works.
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By PYMNTS Intelligence
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Money back from the Treasury Department in this year’s tax filing season isn’t likely to help the nearly 70% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck, a trend increasingly driven by financial necessity, not choice of lifestyle.
Financial strain is persistent across the United States, and the annual tax season—and refunds that come with it—aren’t likely to provide much relief. Roughly two-thirds of American consumers continue to live paycheck to paycheck in early 2026, with little sustained improvement. Within this group, roughly 40%–45% report comfortably paying their monthly bills, while 20%–25% consistently struggle, indicating that a large share of households have little financial slack amid inflation, higher living costs and tariffs. At the same time, the composition of paycheck-to-paycheck living has shifted. Over time, people living this way due to financial necessity have overtaken those living paycheck to paycheck by choice, suggesting that economic pressure—rather than lifestyle preferences—is increasingly driving financial vulnerability.
In theory, tax refunds and one-time government payments could play outsized roles in bolstering household budgets. But paycheck-to-paycheck consumers, especially those struggling to pay bills, are less likely to receive refunds. When they do, they overwhelmingly use the money to cover everyday expenses or repay debt. By contrast, financially stable consumers receive tax refunds more consistently and are far more likely to save or invest them, reinforcing existing gaps in financial resilience.
These are just some of the findings detailed in “Tax Refund Season Reveals the Reality of Paycheck-to-Paycheck America,” the newest installment of the PYMNTS Intelligence exclusive series New Reality Check: The Paycheck-to-Paycheck Report. This edition examines who receives tax refunds, how they use them and how preferences differ between tax refunds and one-time government payments—especially across paycheck-to-paycheck personas and financial lifestyles. It draws on insights from a survey of 2,432 U.S. adult consumers conducted from Jan. 15, 2026, to Jan. 29, 2026.
- Paycheck-to-Paycheck Living
- Tax Refunds and Financial Stability
- One-Time Government Payments and Household Responses
- Read more
- Methodology
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By Maria Volkova, American Banker
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The Federal Reserve’s proposed “skinny” master account for fintechs and other nontraditional financial companies may move quickly towards finalization at the central bank, but experts say implementation will very likely be stalled by legal challenges from the banking industry or the challenger institutions.
Todd Baker, senior fellow at the Richman Center for Business, Law & Public Policy at Columbia University, said lawsuits from either banking or fintech groups are foreseeable, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision to overturn Chevron deference, which reduced the level of judicial deference historically afforded to federal agencies.
“The question is who sues and why, and are they successful in getting a stay on implementation of the regulation until full review by the court,” Baker said. “The way the law has changed is the court doesn’t care what the Fed thinks anymore. The court is going to look at the words of the statute, which don’t provide a lot of clarity.
“It’s very unlikely that [the proposal] will be actually put into effect right away, even if the regulation becomes final,” Baker concluded.
Graham Steele, a former assistant secretary for financial institutions at the Treasury Department and academic fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford Law echoed similar sentiments, noting the Fed will face criticism or litigation from stakeholders regardless of how it proceeds.
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By Andrew Lepczyk, CreditUnions.com
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The “K-shaped economy” is a buzzword that has defined the post-COVID economic landscape. The term describes an environment where those who are high earners and own assets continue to do very well, whereas those on the lower rungs of the economy do worse and worse. In this way, their diverging paths create a “K shape.”
The K-shape is symbolized by different socioeconomic classes’ ability to withstand the headwinds facing the U.S. economy. For example, with inflation, higher income households tend to own assets that are inflation-resistant. Meanwhile, for lower income Americans, inflation in the cost of everyday items eats up more of their budget.
According to a 2023 report from the Federal Reserve, the more money a consumer has, the less stress they are likely to experience as a result of inflation. These diverging impacts and stress levels are present throughout the economy.
A History Of The K-Shaped Economy
For many decades following World War II, economic growth increased at roughly parallel rates for wealthy Americans and lower-income Americans. However, during the 1980s, the haves began to outpace the have-nots. Following the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent surge in inflation, the two halves of America began to uncouple further.
The pandemic disproportionately impacted service-oriented workers who could not work remotely, resulting in furloughs and layoffs shortly after the onset of COVID-19. Federal economic relief checks temporarily abated this impact, but then inflation disproportionately ate away at the budgets of lower-income Americans.
Although the economy on average has caught up, many Americans have been left behind, living paycheck to paycheck and relying on credit cards to make ends meet.
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By Maxwell Earp-Thomas, A.J. S. Dhaliwal, James G. Gatto, Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP – AI Law and Policy; Published in National Law Review
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AI-driven “agentic commerce” is no longer theoretical. Today’s AI assistants can already search for products, compare options, populate shopping carts, check out, initiate payment, and make returns, all on behalf of a person who may never see the website on which a transaction is executed on their behalf. In some cases, users move all the way through checkout using stored payment credentials.
While many systems still operate within guardrails (e.g., requiring human user confirmation or operating under preset limits), the direction is clear: AI agents are beginning to autonomously initiate and execute financial transactions on consumers’ behalf. As these capabilities continue to expand, the line between human- and machine-initiated transactions continues to blur, and legal and regulatory implications come into sharper focus.
What Forms of Agentic Commerce Exist Today?
Today’s implementations of agentic commerce generally fall into two practical tiers. The most common is assisted e-commerce, where AI tools support product discovery, comparison, and checkout within a chat box or embedded interface, but the user still provides explicit approval before any payment is executed. A step closer to autonomy is semi-agentic systems, in which the AI is permitted to complete transactions with minimal or no additional user input once predefined conditions are met.
These systems include features such as price-tracking with automatic purchase triggers, where the user sets parameters in advance and the AI executes the transaction when those parameters are satisfied. Autonomous AI agents that manage the full shopping lifecycle on a user’s behalf are growing rapidly. Often a user gives an agent “goals” and the agent identifies and executes transactions to implement those goals without a contemporaneous human decision that traditional payments laws assume will exist.
Agentic Commerce vs. Compliance
The shift to an increasingly automated shopping experience reframes the regulatory conversation. When an AI assistant pays a bill or clicks “buy”, central compliance questions will revolve around authentication, authorization, fraud, and who bears responsibility when an AI’s actions do not align with a consumer’s wishes or when rogue agents are deployed to execute bogus transactions. For regulators, banks, fintechs, and merchants, existing concepts of consent, liability, and consumer protection strain when transactions are initiated by software rather than people. Current regulatory frameworks concentrate on authorization, fraud controls, and dispute resolution, all of which were designed for human-initiated transactions.
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By Dave Kovaleski, Financial Regulation News
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would clarify the process of determining whether a financial firm is systemically important to the financial system.
Specifically, the legislation requires FSOC to work with a company and its primary regulator to mitigate risks associated with its business activities before designating the company as a Systemically Important Financial Institution (SIFI).
The Council is charged by statute with identifying risks to the financial stability of the United States; promoting market discipline; and responding to emerging threats to the stability of the U.S. financial system.
“Since FSOC was created, lawmakers and administration officials have debated the process of determining if a firm poses a risk to our financial system,” Rep. Bill Foster’s (D-IL), the bill’s sponsor. said. “Past efforts by FSOC to designate firms’ risk levels have been controversial or short-lived. This bipartisan legislation strengthens FSOC’s ability to identify and address emerging threats to financial stability and consumers by promoting a more consistent, accountable, and effective approach to oversight.”
The bill now heads to the U.S. Senate for consideration.
By Leslie Picker and Ritika Shah, CNBC
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At America’s oldest bank, 134 new workers don’t sleep or take sick days. They don’t even have names.
They’re what BNY calls “digital employees.” They work side by side with humans. They have unique roles and are evaluated by how well they do them. Some of their jobs were done by people last year.
“The digital employee works 24/7, which is obviously very different to our human counterparts,” said Rachel Lewis, who oversees nine digital employees in addition to thousands of humans as head of payment operations for BNY. “It’s really focused on very specific repetitive tasks that allow our human employees to do much more human, intense, interesting-type roles.”
BNY employs 48,100 humans, down from about 53,400 in 2023, according to a recent earnings presentation. CFO Dermot McDonogh was asked on the firm’s fourth-quarter analyst call last month what the 134 digital employees mean for cost savings at the firm.
“Our head count has trended down a little bit, but that’s not really anything to do with AI yet,” McDonogh said. “We talk about, internally, AI is unlocking capacity. We don’t think about it in the narrow definition of efficiency. It’s all about growing with clients, increasing revenues and optimizing the potential for our employees.”
Across Wall Street, analysts and investors are starting to ask more questions about how the industry’s expenses on AI will translate into higher efficiencies and greater returns. BNY spent $3.8 billion on technology in 2025, or about 19% of its revenue. That’s the highest proportion among its large-bank peers, according to data collated by CNBC.