Host: So AI agents that can shop and pay for you are still in their early days, but they are gaining some ground. Mastercard expects about 1 in 10 shoppers will be using them regularly. Get this guys, by 2030. So not everyone is sold though. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is weary of banks letting AI agents manage people's money. And for this to really catch on, banks will need a way to confirm that each purchase. It's real and that it's what customers actually want. So there is also one big question hanging over all of this who's responsible when an AI agent goes rogue? So that's going to put a spotlight on security and cybersecurity firm Transmit Security just named Matt Thompson as its new CEO, and he's here to talk more about cybersecurity and obviously security when it comes to AI. Matt, thanks so much for joining us today here on Market Movers. It's definitely awesome to have you, and this is a topic that is top of mind for everyone.
Matt Thompson: Absolutely, absolutely.
Host: So let's go ahead and kick off. So you just got a new role this week at Money 20/20. You were named CEO of Transmit. So why the transition and what are your growth plans?
Matt Thompson: Sure, so I've been in the identity space my entire civilian career, the last 16 years after I left special. and very passionate about the mission area and I've always tried to be at the most decisive point on the identity battlefield if you will and right now it's what's happening with agents everything that you just said in the opening of this and I really believe that Transmit Security, which has real tech in the space to help banks and fintechs navigate agentic trust, is best positioned to have an in the market, so I wanted to be the place where I felt like I could have the biggest impact.
Host: Well, and this is definitely a place where there's a lot of impact. So we talked off camera a little bit. So Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan, there are restricting AI agents from customer accounts. So you've had this conversation with these executives. So is this really about safety concerns, or do banks have the ability to stop the agentic revolution?
Matt Thompson: Yes, so I don't think any of them are trying to stop the agentic revolution. I think what they're doing right now is, you know, setting up war rooms and being very strategic about how they're protecting customer accounts while trying to figure out how to allow which types of agents and then how to control them in their environments. I mean, obviously these are some of the largest financial institutions in the world. Consumer accounts are the crown jewel, and they don't want agents going rogue inside of those moving all of our money. I don't think you'd want that. I certainly wouldn't want it, and they're trying to protect their consumers' accounts right now while figuring out how to enable the agentic revolution. I think from everyone that I've discussed, they recognize that. Blocking everything and allowing anything is not a sustainable strategy in this area.
Host: No, that's definitely interesting. So I want to talk about AI and fraud specifically right now. We know that banks are generating ROI from AI investment when it comes to fraud detection specifically. So but we also know that AI driven fraud schemes are also on the rise. I mean just something as simple as what we saw this morning with PHP and kind of all that going on, so. How are fraudsters grappling with the rise of Agentech commerce at this point?
Matt Thompson: Yes, so I just transitioned from being the president of a company called Socure, and we've shared openly that over the last year we saw an 8,000% rise in the use of deepfakes across the customers that we are protecting there. So AI driven fraud, synthetic identities, deepfakes are definitely on the rise. Companies like the Socures, the Transmit Securities of the world, are working together to really innovate and find ways to combat this, but we have to move at AI pace and we have to help our customers move at the same pace. So one of the challenges with a lot of financial institutions and larger fintechs as well is the governance and how long it takes them to update models to Protect against the evolution and innovation that fraudsters are seeing with respect to their use of AI.
Host: So I want to talk about the agentic opportunity for banks and retailers that embrace this technology. So what are those opportunities?
Matt Thompson: Yes, I think the big thing, you know, we've spent the last 20 years in financial services and I was a part of the team at Capital. To one on their consumer identity team really perfecting kind of the balance of security and usability with human customer flows. I think the opportunity now for banks, fintechs is to really optimize agent user flows as well, so recognizing when this is an agent and then recognizing that you know what the agent was authorized to do on behalf of the human. And then building a flow that's agent specific and then it has the authorizations within the applications of what that human allowed it to do and then obviously security around the different types of agents because all the agents have different kind of security vulnerabilities associated with them so. I think it's applying a lot of the same things that we did for human identity to agents and building great experiences that optimize their onboarding or financial transactions.
Host: No, it's definitely interesting. Well, Matt, thank you so much for joining us today and to really talk about this because this is a topic that is obviously just ever changing. It is and it's super important. So thank you so much for joining us.
Matt Thompson: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
