CommunicationsMatch
Trust, Content Authentication and Financial Services - New White Paper from Tauth Labs
Financial services firms are facing significant new challenges in the AI world.
At the same time banks, securities firms, asset managers, and insurance companies are looking at ways to deploy artificial intelligence to drive efficiencies and create new opportunities, AI is being deployed against them.
As if securing networks was not a significant enough challenge, generative AI is also at the root of new threats to bottom lines, reputations, and clients from the menace of what we call “shadow content,” and an even bigger issue as a consequence - the erosion of trust in the content companies share with their audiences.
We define shadow content as misinformation, disinformation and fraudulent content issued around corporate announcements. The term can be applied more broadly to any content designed to look like it is from a company or individual. In this context, fake texts, emails, articles, and invoices are part of the continuum. It is turning up around quarterly earnings reports, in fake corporate announcements, and around M&A transactions.
It’s important to be clear from the outset that while for the most part in this paper we are focused on communications content (e.g. announcements, press releases, websites, articles, videos, and client communications), the challenges we outline apply to all forms of organizational communications.
With every cyberattack on a company or individual, every phishing event, and every time consumers receive, read or watch content that is fake or designed to deceive, a little bit of trust is lost.
Perceptions of trust are a relative issue. We may see trust in the system declining, but believe that trust in our organizations is separate and distinct. At the level of individual financial institutions, it may be tempting to look at trust as an issue others need to address, or because it is looked at in the context of the overall system, as a too-big-to-solve problem.
The response to risk reaches a tipping point when the cost of fraud, reputational damage, or client concerns outweigh the expense of addressing them. In this paper, we make the case that we are at such a moment.
Fraudulent content is driving a fundamental shift from “trust, but verify” to “verify, then trust.” This matters. If audiences question or no longer trust that content is authentic, they will ignore it and not act on it. Since driving behavior is the purpose of the communications and marketing industries, and critical to the functioning of the digital economy, this is an existential threat.
With leading technology consulting firms sounding the alarm around the reputational risk of AI and fraud, the industry needs to focus on addressing these risks.
Importantly, as we outline in this paper, there are solutions. Content authentication, which addresses both trust in the system and the risk of shadow content, offers one path to rebuild trust into content.
Rebuilding trust into content and protecting companies and clients from shadow content requires a multidisciplinary approach to minimize the impact of these new risks. And, while we primarily focus here on external and client communications applications, as a senior professional at one of the large banks shared, ultimately the technology will need to be built into all digital documents.
Trust, Content Authentication, and Financial Services White Paper