Clarity to Expand Use of AWS Generative AI Services

Amazon Web Services

Clarity AI plans to expand its use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The company already uses other AWS solutions to help investors and consumers make more sustainable investments and purchase decisions, the companies said in a Sunday (Nov. 26) press release.

Clarity AI’s sustainability technology platform harnesses the power of AI, ML and analytics to provide clear and objective sustainability and social impact data on companies, funds and local governments, empowering stakeholders to make informed decisions, according to the release.

The AWS cloud computing platform provides the necessary infrastructure for Clarity AI to be a data-driven company, and AWS generative AI, ML and analytics capabilities enable Clarity AI to process vast amounts of data and extract valuable insights, the release said.

Clarity AI’s platform utilizes Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service for building and deploying ML models, to train large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP) models, per the release. These models analyze unstructured data from sustainability reports, financial reports, earnings calls and research documents, enabling Clarity AI to identify companies impacted by specific news events and assess the level of environmental severity. The unbiased information derived from this analysis is then shared with investors, researchers and consumers, empowering them to make sustainable decisions.

The platform also integrates with existing eCommerce environments, allowing Clarity AI to provide environmental analyses of various product categories such as electronics, fashion and apparel, groceries, household brands, and health and beauty companies, according to the press release. By visually identifying sustainable brands and displaying badges that recognize their sustainability performance, Clarity AI enables environmentally conscious shoppers to support sustainable practices through their purchases.

Addressing the challenge of fragmented data and lack of unified reporting standards in sustainable investing, Clarity AI develops generative AI models on AWS to uncover new data points that help clients avoid investing in companies or funds engaged in greenwashing or harmful environmental practices, the release said.

The platform also utilizes Amazon QuickSight, AWS’s business intelligence service, to present findings through interactive dashboards, reports, embedded analytics and natural language queries, per the release.

In one recent deployment of Clarity AI’s capabilities, the company teamed up with eCommerce payment solutions platform Klarna to provide environmental impact information to consumers who have purchased electronics. Together, the companies show “conscious badges” to consumers who have made an electronics purchase using the Klarna app.


Mastercard and Feedzai Team to Fight AI-Powered Scams

Feedzai, Trust Payments, risk management

Mastercard has teamed with financial crime prevention company Feedzai to help financial institutions prevent scams.

“As payments continue to evolve, fraudsters are increasingly using AI to scam consumers,” the companies said in a news release Tuesday (Feb. 18). “This cost more than $1 trillion last year, with more than 50% of consumers saying they had encountered a scam at least once a week.”

To that end, Mastercard will leverage Feedzai’s fraud platform, available in more than 90 countries, to deploy its Consumer Fraud Risk (CFR) solution to customers across many key markets around the world.

According to the release, CFR provides sending and receiving financial institutions in account-to-account payment transactions with intelligence to spot and prevent scams in real time. Since going live in the U.K. in 2023, the value of authorized push payment (APP) scams has fallen by more than 12% in that country.

Feedzai’s AI-native Financial Crime Prevention Platform, the release adds, is used by leading financial institutions to protect more than a billion consumers worldwide, and upwards of $8 trillion in transactions each year.

“With more than half the world’s population affected, the scale of scam fraud is not only having a devastating impact on consumers, but also surpassing the GDP of many individual economies,” said Johan Gerber, executive vice president, head of Security Solutions at Mastercard. “Together with Feedzai’s global platform we will scale our first-of-its-kind scams solution to more markets, helping more financial institutions combat financial crime faster than before.”

PYMNTS Intelligence research has found that scams became the leading form of fraud last year, ahead of digital payment fraud. The share of scam-related fraud rose by 56%, and financial losses from scams increased 121%. Scams now make up 23% of all fraudulent transactions, with relationship/trust and product/service scams generating the most losses. 

“These scams manipulate individuals into authorizing fraudulent transactions, often using deceptive tactics,” PYMNTS wrote. “Additionally, fraud involving compromised credentials, where individuals are tricked into revealing account details, is also on the rise.”

Additional research by PYMNTS Intelligence has found that many financial institutions (FIs) are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to detect fraud.

“These technologies analyze large amounts of transaction data in real time, spotting suspicious activity and preventing fraudulent payments before they are completed,” PYMNTS wrote late last year.

The research found that 71% of FIs are using AI and ML for fraud detection, up from 66% in 2023. These technologies can identify anomalies and patterns that might not be detected by human analysts, allowing banks to perform quicker decision-making.