California lawmakers passed roughly 1,200 bills last year, including some that resulted in unforeseeable wins by Republicans, promising protections for consumers and small strides for those in the entertainment industry. In the end, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed about 84% of the bills he received. Many of those laws take effect today, Jan. 1, as California rings in a new year. Cannabis cafes are legal: You can now hang out at dispensaries like you would a restaurant or cafe, thanks to AB 1775. The new law brings an Amsterdam-style approach to marijuana use, by allowing cannabis retailers to make and sell food and nonalcoholic beverages at what will be known as cannabis cafes or lounges.

When a customer overdraws their account and their balance is negative they are assessed an overdraft fee. Americans pay approximately \$15 billion in unnecessary overdraft fees a year, often in \$35 increments; users of the Mint personal finance app pay approximately \$250 million in fees a year in particular. These overdraft fees are an excessive financial burden and lead to cascading overdraft fees trapping customers in financial hardship. To address this problem, we have created an ML-driven overdraft early warning system (ODEWS) that assesses a customer's risk of overdrafting within the next week using their banking and transaction data in the Mint app. At-risk customers are sent an alert so they can take steps to avoid the fee, ultimately changing their behavior and financial habits. The system deployed resulted in a \$3 million savings in overdraft fees for Mint customers compared to a control group. Moreover, the methodology outlined here can be generalized to provide ML-driven personalized financial advice for many different personal finance goals--increase credit score, build emergency savings fund, pay down debut, allocate capital for investment.

As artificial intelligence and machine learning deploy across financial sectors, federal government needs a way to ensure standards for stability and inclusion are followed. Measuring risks and setting benchmarks for emerging fintech is top of mind for agencies such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Commerce Department. In her first public engagement since being sworn in earlier this month, NIST Director Laurie Locascio told an audience at Stanford University on Wednesday that the president's 2023 budget request calls for an additional $80 million to expand and strengthen NIST capabilities for targeting critical and emerging technologies. Listing ways the agency is trying to enable trustworthy AI, she said NIST scientists and engineers are developing taxonomies, terminology and testbeds for measuring AI risks. "NIST is developing a resource center of documents, software and standards and related tools that continue to better understanding and better identification of measurement, and management of various risks associated with AI systems," she said during the Artificial Intelligence and the Economy Conference.

Workers with lower-than-median wages are often prone to financial instability and affected by bank policies such as penalty and overdraft fees, leading to a vicious cycle of debt and poor credit. During 2016 alone, banks made over $30 billion from overdraft fees. The workers with the least financial cushion are typically the most vulnerable in these situations. This summer, as a part of our Science for Social Good program, we partnered with New York City-based organization Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners to tackle this problem. One of the main goals of Neighborhood Trust is to empower low-income individuals and families to become productive participants in the financial system.

Meet Dave: an AI dressed up in a bearsuit that's just launched to save you from the evils of expensive overdraft fees. Hand Dave access to your checking account and the app's machine learning algorithms will get busy crunching your spending data so the bear can warn you about pending transactions -- like a monthly subscription for Netflix or your typical Saturday night Uber bill -- which might push you into the red and incur an expensive bank penalty. The US-only app predicts a user's "7 Day Low", aka the lowest it thinks your bank balance will drop in the next seven days, in order to encourage and support better money management. The ultimate aim being to help people avoid having to fall back on their overdraft as "an expensive form of credit", says co-founder Jason Wilk, describing it as a sort of "weather forecast" for money management. Dave also includes a payday loan facility -- so users who face the inevitability of having to dip into a negative balance can opt to borrow up to $250 ahead of their next paycheck to see them through.

A CNN Money report found that Americans paid more than $6 billion in overdraft fees in 2013 to the top three banks alone. A CNN Money report found that Americans paid more than $6 billion in overdraft fees in 2013 to the top three banks alone. Ahead of their official presentation at the Money 20/20 FinTech conference in Las Vegas, Change Labs has announced the launch of their platform and savings product, along with their latest pilot service that they are calling Predictive Overdraft Protection . Co-founded in 2015 by CEO Yaniv Levi, Head of Product Assaf Priel, and CTO Dmitri Chebotarev, Change Labs is on a mission to reshape the way that people behave with their money. So far the company has succeeded in raising $1.3 million in seed capital to reach their alpha testing round from various unidentified backers.