CFPB's Stance on AI & Payments and AI
Here's what's going on this week in AI x Banking.
Hi everyone!
Conference season is among us—the Greenlite team is at the Datos Financial Crime and Fraud conference in Charlotte, North Carolina this week. Our CEO Will spoke about the impact of Gen AI on scaling compliance, with Ally Bank, Truist, Hawk, and Worldpay. So far, all of the panels have been really insightful, and there’s been a strong focus on AI. If you’re in Charlotte and have time to meet, let us know!
CFPB Offers A Glimpse Into Its AI Perspective
The Treasury Department has been soliciting comments from financial services companies and regulators for their thoughts on AI over the past few months. As this Skadden Apres post notes, the CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) posted their comment recently, which gives us some insight into how the consumer regulator is thinking about AI’s application in financial services.
The whole post is worth a read, but here are some of the highlights:
AI Falls Under Existing Rules: One of the main points of the CFPB’s comment is that AI falls under existing regulation. This makes sense—financial regulators don’t regulate technology, just the uses of it. And they’ve been exploring the uses of AI for years now, so they’re well prepared (as opposed to crypto, which became mainstream almost overnight.)
Strong Focus On Preventing Discrimination & Bias: The CFPB’s main goal here is going to be around preventing discrimination and bias that can come from LLM’s and predictive models. By accident, some models can prevent certain type of people, or folks from certain geographies, access to financial services. This is in violation of most financial regulation like the Fair Lending Act. The CFPB encourages a lot of quantitative testing to ensure that these systems aren’t biased.
Regulation Should Focus On Creating A Level Playing Field: Interestingly, the CFPB also advocated for a level playing field for companies building in the AI-finance space, and that regulation should be concentrated here. The focus here is around fair pricing and not favoring incumbents, and making sure the regulators keep track of anticompetitive practices.
Citi Research Talks Gen AI Startups
A great new Citi Ventures report is out highlighting all the interesting startups building in and around financial services.
It’s a great read and highly recommend checking it out (not just because they mention Greenlite!)
Overall the thesis is that companies are taking 3 different approaches to building here:
Horizontal and not domain specific
Horizontal and domain specific
Vertical and domain specific
The market map shows a bunch of the players in each space—companies like Hebbia and Glean in the first bucket and Greenlite and others in the second. The third group is more focused on the application layer—everything from the CFO stack to Wealth Management and Personal Financial Management.
AI Comes Into Focus For Payments Companies
Convera’s Fintech 2025+ report has a fantastic overview of where the ecosystem is headed over the next year. One of the areas of focus is, of course, Gen AI.
This time, it focuses in a bit more on the payments industry. According to Convera’s research there’s been more AI mentions than ever before in earning calls of publicly traded payments companies.
Customer service is pretty straightforward—Gen AI is having a big impact on chatbots in financial services. Productivity benefits also makes sense—Gen AI can increase operational efficiency for payments companies. The risk management, to us, is the most interesting use case. Companies are using Gen AI for better KYC and onboarding, but also for analyzing data sets much faster and much more easily than older methods.
It’s just yet another example of how all areas of financial services—from lending to compliance and payments—is seeing impacts from Gen AI.