An elderly grandmother who chats about knitting patterns, recipes for scones and the blackness of the night sky to anyone who will listen has become an unlikely tool in combatting scammers. Like many people, "Daisy" is beset with countless calls from fraudsters, who often try to take control of her computer after claiming she has been hacked. But because of her dithering and inquiries about whether they like cups of tea, the criminals end up furious and frustrated rather than successful. Daisy is, of course, not a real grandmother but an AI bot created by computer scientists to combat fraud. Her task is simply to waste the time of the people who are trying to scam her.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. Phones, laptops and other telecom devices serve as essential bridges that connect the world. However, the telecom industry is also exposed to several ongoing threats and vulnerabilities, as malicious actors continue to advance with more sophistication and even innovation. The Truecaller Insights 2021 U.S. Spam and Scam Report estimates a staggering $29.8 billion was lost to phone scams in the United States in 2020 alone. Steven Wilson, head of Europol's European Cybercrime Center (EC3), said in a report that financially motivated cybercriminals will always find ways to exploit new and existing business processes and technologies.

Saudi Arabia's Company for Cooperative Insurance (Tawuniya) has picked SAS to bolster its analytics and fraud/waste prevention capability within its medical insurance segment. Tawuniya has deployed a SAS Insurance Fraud Management system to improve the speed of claims settlement and fraud identification. The insurer will also be able to leverage SAS predictive modeling to detect anomalies and outliers to minimise losses through the use of analytics. Tawuniya will also benefit from a more efficient medical claim cycle, powered by the SAS AI, analytics and machine learning (ML) capabilities embedded in the solution. According to Global Health Care Anti-Fraud Network, it is estimated that $260bn, approximately 6 per cent of global health care spending is lost to fraud annually.

Byron Lichtenstein is a principal at Insight Partners, and sees most opportunity in the convergence between software and payments. Insight Partners focuses mainly on growth-stage software companies across verticals from education to social media to fintech, and it has invested in German neobank N26, business expense management startup Divvy, and payment fraud monitoring startup Sift. Here are the ways he sees payments and software coming together to find value in a changing industry. "Historically, we've always been software investors," Lichtenstein told Business Insider. "What's changed over the past two years that we found really interesting is that dumb payments don't really --obviously, they exist --but they're not really a thing anymore," Lichtenstein said.

Digital channels targeting the mass consumer market are helping insurers swell their client base without the need for traditional intermediaries – but at a cost. One cost is increased risk of fraud, global insurance fraud analytics firm FRISS said during an event in Chile outlining the results of the first fraud survey of its kind covering all Latin America. As technology develops and purchasing habits change, insurers are increasingly leveraging digital channels, allowing consumers to take out policies online, directly from an insurer, in a largely frictionless manner. The trend is forecast to continue in Latin America as insurers seek to keep costs under control, tap what is still an underpenetrated market, and stand out from the crowd. One consequence of this is the sidelining of brokers, whose detailed client knowledge can help prevent fraud, said FRISS, a Dutch firm that provides an AI-powered platform to help P&C insurers combat fraud and which carried out the survey of insurance companies.

SAS, the market leader in Analytics & Anti-fraud Technologies, and Najm for Insurance Services have announced a technology collaboration that will aim to bring SAS expertise to counter and reduce instances of fraud in Automobile and Motor insurance claims. Officials from both companies signed the agreement at a SAS event in Fairmont Riyadh on Wednesday. With the goal of streamlining claims through application assessment and taking a proactive approach to detect & deter fraud in the business, Najm is looking to improve efficiency in fraud identification, fast claims resettlement as well as the development of better-quality alerts, by utilizing the latest analytics & fraud detection technologies. Utilizing Artificial Intelligence and Machine-Learning technologies, SAS will automate aspects of Najm's claimant profiling, and will aim to complement existing manual processes to detect fraud claims through behavioral responses and automatically assess risk patterns. During the event, Najm CEO Dr. Mohammad Al-Suliman spoke about the partnership with SAS and the company's future plans.

In short, yes, Artificial Intelligence is effective in fighting fraud. It is already preventing a lot of fraud and is expected to dramatically decrease all cases of fraud in as little as 4 years. Artificial intelligence (AI) may be the only way to combat this. Whether it is the latest iPhone or software which makes running your business more efficient, we crave it. Every time a new update or bit of tech comes out, there comes new ways for fraudsters to exploit it.

From the discovery of an eighth exoplanet circling distant star Kepler-90 to Microsoft's ambitious new project to map and decode the human immune system, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and especially its subset Machine Learning – a field of Computer Science that gives computers the ability to "learn" based on past data – have seen a promising boom in application across numerous industries over the past decade. The investment banking sector is amongst those. Opportunities abound, from the basics – like relieving employees of time-consuming, menial tasks, such as cleaning their inboxes or resetting passwords – to more consequential services – such as fighting money laundering, rogue trading, and cybercrime. Even more, the technology promises to protect employee rights through unprejudiced recruitment. Over the past few years, banks, from HSBC to Credit Suisse, have been partnering with financial technology companies to integrate AI into a wide range of operations.

Temenos (SIX:TEMN), the banking software company, expanded its financial crime mitigation product to include an AI-based Suspicious Activity Prevention solution protecting banks and their customers from fraud. Demand for financial compliance and the increasing levels of financial crime are putting huge pressure on banks. Their legacy processes have grown so complex with a high level of manual work for screening alerts and other fraud mitigation activities. Each manual step is inefficient and prone to errors. High level of false positive rates exacerbate this problem.

All things change, and you must adapt over time. Ongoing monitoring of machine learning fraud detection systems is imperative for success. As populations and the underlying data shift, expected system inputs degrade and therefore have an impact on overall performance. This isn't unique to machine learning systems; rule-based systems have the same challenge. But newer machine learning methods can adapt to new and unidentified patterns as underlying changes occur. This eliminates some, but not all, of the machine learning retraining and evaluation steps.