Author: Gayathri
Gayathri
Gayathri P. Ajith is a content and editorial professional with a strong foundation in literature and digital media. Currently serving as a Content Editor at TechBuzz Media, she crafts insightful and accessible content across banking, compliance, and risk management domains. With a sharp focus on clarity and relevance, she brings research-backed storytelling to the evolving world of financial technology.
The New Face of Sanctions Evasion Picture this: A shell company in an offshore jurisdiction quietly transfers $2.4 million to a crypto exchange on a Saturday night. Within 10 minutes, the funds are converted to stablecoins, hop across multiple chains, and land in a European bank account under a different name. By Monday morning, the funds are clean, but compliance officers are scrambling. This is Sanctions Evasion 2.0, the new age of AI-defiant, crypto-enabled cross-border laundering. Banks and regulators are now confronting a new question: How do you detect money that shapeshifts across blockchains, exchanges, and shell entities faster than…
The New Normal of Invisible Exposure It begins, as most risk stories do, with a surprise. A global bank’s core payment service goes offline for three hours. The culprit isn’t malware or insider fraud; it’s a small subcontractor several layers deep in the supply chain who failed to renew a critical encryption certificate. Within minutes, the outage ripples across customers, regulators, and news feeds. The board’s question is simple but chilling: “Who was that vendor, and how did we not see this coming?” Welcome to 2025, where third-party risk has become as dynamic as the financial markets themselves. The traditional…
When Algorithms Watch the Watchmen It’s a Friday evening in the control room of a securities regulator. The usual dashboards glow, humming with market data. Then, an anomaly alert pops up, a surge in social-media chatter, a burst of retail trading, and a small digital brokerage suddenly leading in trade volumes. Within minutes, the system connects these dots and warns of possible market manipulation. No human analyst saw it coming first; AI did. This isn’t sci-fi. It’s the new face of financial supervision, powered by Supervisory Technology or SupTech. Around the world, regulators are re-architecting how they oversee markets, firms,…
Imagine logging into your advisory platform and seeing more than just performance metrics. Your dashboard automatically forecasts potential rebalancing opportunities, flags tax inefficiencies, and drafts a client-ready portfolio narrative. That’s not a vision board; that’s WealthTech 2025. The decade-old story of robo-advisors is giving way to a new chapter: AI-powered portfolio intelligence, a space where algorithms don’t just follow rules but learn, infer, and communicate like seasoned wealth strategists. For years, the wealth management industry has oscillated between automation and human expertise. Even though Robo-advisors had democratized investing, it still lacked personalization. Hybrid models combined algorithms with human touch but…
Digital trust has entered a new era. Between 2024 and 2025, the Behavioral Biometrics & Device Intelligence market has evolved from experimental deployment to strategic adoption. Once seen as a niche extension of fraud prevention, behavioral biometrics is now a cornerstone of financial crime compliance, continuous authentication, and AI-led identity orchestration. The SPARK Matrix™: Behavioral Biometrics & Device Intelligence study captures this transformation in full. Compared to the 2024 edition, the new study reveals an ecosystem that has expanded in maturity, vendor diversity, and technological depth. The market is no longer defined by how users type or swipe, it’s now…
The New Frontier of Money Imagine paying for a coffee in 2028 with your government’s digital currency, not a bank app or credit card, but a direct transaction with your central bank. The money settles instantly, the merchant is credited in seconds, and no intermediary rails are needed. That’s the promise of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), and yet, the reality remains uneven. More than 130 countries are exploring CBDCs, but fewer than a dozen have reached public rollout. Projects like China’s e-CNY, Nigeria’s eNaira, and the Bahamas’ Sand Dollar are pioneering use cases, while others remain in limited pilots.…
A New Passport for the Digital Economy Imagine a future where your smartphone serves as a universally recognized passport, allowing you to cross borders, open bank accounts, or sign financial contracts anywhere in Europe. That future is fast approaching under Europe’s eIDAS 2.0 regulation and the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI Wallet) initiative. In recent months, the topic has been floating across LinkedIn, X, and YouTube, gathering millions of impressions from policy analysts, digital bankers, and privacy advocates alike. What makes it so viral is its dual nature: the promise of frictionless identity verification paired with deep questions around sovereignty,…
Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) platforms have moved from being back-office control centers to becoming strategic intelligence layers across enterprises. What was once a compliance checklist has now evolved into a connected orchestration system, one that unifies enterprise risk, audit, cyber resilience, and ESG visibility. The SPARK Matrix™ for GRC Platforms, published by QKS Group, captures this transformation in sharp relief. A comparison of the 2023 and 2024 editions reveals a market reshaped by AI-driven risk analysis, cyber-risk quantification, and low-code automation. Some vendors consolidated their dominance, while others ascended rapidly by aligning their platforms with GenAI, ESG, and integrated…
When Your Bank Account Becomes a Smart Contract Imagine this: you deposit ₹10,000 into your savings account on Friday. Instead of sitting idle, that balance is automatically allocated into a tokenized, short-term on-chain yield instrument that earns interest over the weekend, and settles back into your account on Monday, fully compliant, auditable, and regulator-ready. This isn’t a sci-fi vision. In 2025, the once-separate worlds of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Traditional Finance (TradFi) are converging. What’s emerging is Hybrid Finance (HyFi), a model where digital assets, tokenized instruments, and smart contracts seamlessly interact with regulated banking systems. For banks, fintechs, and…
When Your AI Guard Dog Gets Hacked Picture this: a leading digital bank deploys AI models to detect fraudulent transactions and automate cyber response. The algorithms act as vigilant guards, spotting anomalies faster than any human team could. But one day, that same AI is deceived, fed manipulated data that blinds its detection layer. The result? A silent breach, cascading financial losses, and a regulatory firestorm. In this scenario, one question looms large: who bears the financial burden of AI-driven cyber failures, the bank, the fintech, or the insurer? This is the new frontier of cyber insurance for banks and…